Saturday Deluxe / 2 April 2016

April Fools!

I’m sad to report that our ‘news story’ about the Wham! Make It Bigger reissue was SDE having a bit of fun on April Fools’ Day. But I think you probably knew that…

Perhaps surprisingly, in five years this is the first time SDE has ‘risked’ running an April Fools’ story (let’s face it, they can fall flat) but I very much got the feeling that you enjoyed the joke – although sorry if you had that ‘spike’ of excitement for a moment when you thought that this might be real. Like most pop fans who grew up in the 1980s, I’d love to see a Make It Big reissue, myself.

I goes to show just how weird of some of the items that have made it into super deluxe edition box sets are (marbles etc.) when what I thought were ludicrous inclusions (shuttlecock, teeth whitening kit) weren’t enough to give the game away for some!

Pet Shop Boys Superstore

I was in West London yesterday morning having a little chat with the team at Warner Music, but just after lunch headed east to Shoreditch to check out the Pet Shop Boys‘ ‘pop-up’ shop which will be open for just three days to promote their new album (out yesterday) SUPER.

Called, appropriately enough, SUPERstore, the shop is a tiny unit in the Boxpark complex, which specialises in pop-up fashion and lifestyle shops. There was no actual stock on show, and inside it was more like a gallery, with all the items for sale, including signed vinyl, signed CDs, T-shirts, badges etc hanging on frames on the wall. You basically gave your order to one of the members of staff who went ‘out the back’ to get your items. The shop opened at 11am but by the time I got there the signed prints which were limited to 150 were all gone. It was fairly busy, but the big crowds had dispersed early on, but the sounds of things.

As you can see from the photo above, there were also listening stations along the wall where fans could have a listen to SUPER, although I kind of doubt anyone made the effort to turn up at the shop, had a listen and thought “nah!”.

I picked up a signed white vinyl (£24) and a signed CD (£15) but didn’t bother with a T-shirt. With every order you get a free ‘Tote’ bag.

You can read more about SUPER here. The SUPERSTORE is open for two more days – today and tomorrow.

Spin CDs

British online music retailer Spin CDs think it’s okay to steal content from other websites. As pointed out to me by an SDE reader, on their pre-order listing (under ‘product details’) for the Pure McCartney deluxe they have simply copied and pasted everything I wrote on SDE yesterday!

I have to say this has happened before, on their blog a few years back. They eventually apologised and took the content down, but the fact that it has happened again shows there must be a culture in their organisation where staff are encouraged to take content from other sites.

I’d ask you to support SDE and complain to Spin CDs about this behaviour, by emailing them or better still tweet your message to them, tagging @spincds and @sdedition. I will then retweet. Remember, in terms of content, SDE is largely a team of one. It’s Goliath stealing from David as far as I’m concerned. 

It really is outrageous behaviour and a very stupid thing for them to do since if I served them with a “DMCA takedown” Google could unlist them which could have a very serious impact on their website/business. I haven’t done that yet, but they were alerted last night and the content is still up and I’ve had no response…