+ Breaking News

There is a new CD club on the scene named "CDx". The club's gimmick: no hidden shipping and handling charges. Members pay the price listed in the catalog and no more; except of course for sales taxes. The initial new member offer is "5 CDs for $9.99, buy 1 CD to fulfill". As no CDx single CD titles are priced over $9.99, a completed membership should cost about $19.98 (plus sales taxes and stamps, etc) for 6 CDs or about $3.33 per CD. This new club is brought to us by BMG.

BMG debuted its revamped web site on 15 December 1997. Within a few days of launch, the site had been removed from service due to an unforeseen level of demand. The site has since been restored to service. Along with being compatible with more browsers, BMG's site provides some new features including account history for the past 90 days and "Member-Get-A-Member" applications. The online "Member-Get-A-Member" offer is not as good as the mail-in offer.

Speaking of web sites, the CD Club FAQ has another home: http://www.primenet.com/~bpvh/cdclubs/. If the address looks familiar, its because its my own. This site is in addition to the http://www.blooberry.com/cdfaq/ site and has links to the two HTML versions of the CD Club FAQ, primary and secondary, plus links to other official and unofficial CD club related sites. The secondary site will always have the most current version of the FAQ but until I find the time, the HTML coding will be extremely primitive (i.e. a big PRE'ed document).

CDHQ has another "We Broke the Rules" offer (Stereo Review, Jan 98) and this one is evil. Billed as "11 CDs for the price of 1" it requires the purchase of 6 CDs at regular price to fulfill the membership purchase requirements. As mentioned in v4.16, the "broke the rules" part of the offer is that the member does not need to decline the selection of the month; no CDs will be shipped unless ordered.