I can’t help but think they’ve done me a favour. I was all for resubbing but it was really against my better judgement. I think I’d constantly have been sitting around waiting for the walls to come crashing in on my £400
Agree. I was wavering about resubscribing. The Gus Cannon insult is pretty much the last straw, but there have been many issues adding up.
Let's face reality here. VMP is on a death spiral, grasping for survival. But once in the spiral, few companies survive.
I would NOT renew for longer than 3 months. Too much risk that it goes bankrupt during the term of a longer subscription.
Any business that just dumps a significant chunk of their customers is not long for this world.
But let's review where we are with VMP.
1. A failed and ill-advised attempt to start a pressing plant that ended in litigation and losses.
2. A decline in curation. I have only 5 ROTM's in 2024, and an equal number of swaps - and I lose on every swap for store credit.
3. Declining quality. GZ pressings.
4. Firing their entire CS team and going to an automated AI customer service system that isn't terribly intelligent and doesn't respond to support tickets.
5. The Ramones swap fiasco.
6. Cancelling all international subscriptions leaving all international customers hanging. There could have been, and are, other soultions. Claiming to be putting them in stores outside the US places the burden for defective pressings on the local stores. The mather solution.
7. The clearout sales, re-subscribe giveaway offers, the discount bundles - all point to VMP becoming a close-out sale outlet. A sure tell-tale of cash flow issues.
8. Cancellation of two tracks only fairly recently added.
9. Seeming challenges in licensing. Gus Cannon? Teo? La Lupe? These are not 'lost sounds found', they aren't even 'b' titles or 'c' artists.
10. The apparent decline in resale values across VMP titles. Partly over saturation, partly due to the deep discounting over the past year, partly too many shit exclusives. Some local stores don't take in used VMP any more. Too many, they don't sell.
11. Price increases on top of price increases, making many 'exclusives' cost-prohibited compared to their widely available counterparts, and pushing the price of subscription titles well above other higher quality product in the market.
It only takes a few of these to put a company on the road to ruin. That all have taken place in short order is almost impossible to survive.
The number of smoke signals they are sending out recently shows a company that is rudderless.