It’s weird thinking back on the Blue Note anthology where they gave those album cover clues in the video and basically gave all of the albums away. Still, people weren’t happy that there was no official confirmation. But it seems like they’re moving in the opposite direction and providing fewer and fewer clues. Blue Note was the only anthology that I seriously thought about purchasing because I streamed all of the albums, definitely didn’t own any of them, and liked what I heard. But they lost me on the price.
It feels like their unspoken target customer is someone who doesn’t know much about music or have much of an existing record collection but is willing to shell out for something that either will be viewed as collectible and have high resale value or will give their record collection some hipster cred. The ROTM tracks are like a mini, entry-level version of that, and I will shamelessly say I have spent more money than I should have on just because of the convenience of getting albums I’m unfamiliar with to close some of the gaps in my collection. But at least with those, they do get announced before you have to commit and you have at least a few days to stream the record and decide, or you can go in blind, but it’s only for 1-3 records, all priced at less than $30.
Now that they’re getting rid of the monthly subs, you have to commit for at least 3 records at a time. It’s not a completely blind commitment since you can swap, but even that ability is now being restricted, too. And I have to think that the success of Anthology is partly responsible for that change. If they can focus more on customers willing to shell out larger and larger sums for larger chunks of records more and more blindly - there’s no incentive to continue to offer one-offs, and definitely not to offer them at a good price, hence the price increases in the store this year to discourage those one-off purchases that don’t require a larger subscription commitment.
