After two and a half years of preparation, Blood Music is compiling a huge and particularly expensive box set of everything Emperor officially released, and then some. For 700 Euros (currently 744.52 USD or 492.38 pounds sterling), you can get a swathe of material released between 1992 and 2009 – from the band’s earliest demos, to their studio albums, to the occasional post-dissolution live performance document and so on. Now, this is obviously a major financial investment; the people at Blood Music claim it’s due to the cost of press vinyl and creating the lavish packaging. Unless you’re a complete and utter Emperor die hard, it’s a tough sell, and it suffers from the typical box set pitfall of including later and less accomplished works in addition to In The Nightside Eclipse. Blood Music would do well to renege on their promise not to publish albums separately in this form, at least if they want to get in on the ambitious “One Emperor Album Per Child” initiative we could start if we had the funding and global reach we seek.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb6JiKL3d1s
Tags: 2016, Black Metal, blood music, cash grab, emperor, in the nightside eclipse, reissue, symphonic metal, vinyl
This product is obviously a pricing experiment, and an interesting one at that. Statistically, some minority of die-hard metalheads who were young in the 90s are now adults with a considerable amount of financial success. How much can you milk this tiny market for, how much are they willing to pay? The almost absurd price of this is probably simply a way to test this. If they actually sell these be prepared to see lines of “high-end” metal products coming out more and more often for that particular niche.
It could be good, it could in fact help lower prices for other sectors of the market. Having a product with such a ridiculous profit margin (as I’m guessing this has) could allow labels to be less strict and careful with initial investment in new bands, and in general allow them to be more relaxed in the work in other areas and generally take more risks.
In their Facebook posts, Blood Records seems to be claiming their profit margins aren’t that high, but whether that’s true or not may end up less important than how quickly these boxes sell. Even if they don’t cut corners, someone else might.
Sigh. No company can say they are making obscene profits. This price is absurd and the profit margin as high as clothing. A very conservative profit margin estimate here is 90%. I think OP called it with testin his theory that they’re testing the market. I don’t think this will sell because at this price, buying this is a display of wealth more than anything else, and I doubt that’s common amongst emperor fans.
Oh hell yeah, here we go , been waitn for this shit. Following da success of “Anthems…”, the members of Emperor became ever more actiev in their various side-projects and moved further away from the true essence of black metal (surprise surpirse you fucking DOGz cos money doesnt talk it swears. They took the positive reactions to such a flawed album as meaning that they should continue in the same direction, which only led them to create a record that can only be looking at as an abomination to those of tru in spirit. You know what I mean, and by 9 equalibrium they basically learned to such a cock so hard they could disloge there own fillings in the process.
By 1999, blackmetal had become a worldwide trend and a good number of these bands were taking influence from Emperor’s pale vitamin deprived earlier works, incorporating a great deal of synth into their music, often at the expense of actual riffs. I mean wtf is a carousel or some shit . Even worse, they were adding gothic elements and making something that was really the antithesis of what it claimed to be. Ihsahn, himself, jumped on this symphonic/goth bandwagon with his side-project, Peccatum. It is kind of humourous that he got swept up in trends that he had some part in influencing in the first place. Meanwhile, Samoth had been moving in a different direction, becoming more interested in technicality than obscurity.
Therein lies one of the greatest differences between Emperor’s third full-length album and those that came before it. There is a total absence of the obscure atmosphere that was conveyed by In the Nightside Eclipse, which itself was somewhat of a leap in quality from the necro sound of Wrath of the Tyrant. Still, there was a common thread that ran between them. Even from the band’s debut L.P. to Anthems… one can hear some traces of their black metal roots, despite how overblown and convoluted that whole record was. They had at least tried to create some kind of atmosphere, even if their horrid symphonic approach failed. With IX Equilibrium, they failed in a different way. Horz up
This is the official Blood Music’s statement about the box: https://www.facebook.com/BlooodMusic/posts/993742500683077
Total cost will be 700 euros, containing a total of 24 vinyl records. If you count the 7” and the book as vinyl records (total of 26 records) it is (almost) 27 euros per record (yeap this is not a joke). So a double LP will cost 54 euros and a triple LP will cost a staggering 81 euros!!! Yes you read correctly, 81 euros for a triple LP. To add insult to injury p&p cost for this box will be anything between 75 and 150 euros (depends on location). Add to this the banking fees and you might come close to something like 900 euros!
I will pass. I am not a huge Emperor fan, but even if I were I’d still think twice before buying it.
I would need to be beaten by police to afford this.
I’m set: I bought ITNE for €5 ages ago. If there were justice in economics, that album would’ve probably cost me more than €700.