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A lot of sites that sell music online can provide minimal information about the CDs they sell, such as track listings and song clips. A lot of times you even get an album cover (try to contain your excitement). If a CD is really popular, the site may contract out with Rolling Stone or the All Music Guide to get a short description of the music.
Now, if that's all you need to make a purchase decision, fine. However, instrumental guitar music is, to use a marketing phrase, a "niche product", which is a fancy way of saying that the market is so small for the product that the company creating it must be out of their mind.
Given that the market is small to begin with, why make it even smaller by withholding (or not providing in the first place) information about a CD that might actually help someone to decide to buy it?
First of all, given that most CDs are sold at retail (including Internet retailers), it's not surprising that the information about instrumental recordings is sparse. After all, they are going to make their money selling thousands of Brittany Spears' records or hundreds of thousands of Matchbox 20 CDs. When your target consumer is the mass audience that buys mainly records they've heard on the radio, where is the financial incentive to invest in providing a wealth of information about a genre that almost never is heard on the radio?
Guitar Nine takes the opposite approach. That is to say, we focus on a particular genre that appeals only to a select group of devotees world wide. It becomes natural for us to distinguish ourselves from the numerous Internet retailers (who take delight in showing us all how similar they can be to one other) and the traditional record stores (who never provided information in the first place) by offering a wealth of data about the recordings and the artists who produce the recordings.
So you'll find additional information such as track times (some people like the long songs), full artist credits (who produced that CD anyway?), reviews (nothing helps like a few professional opinions about an unfamiliar artist), track comments (what was the motivation behind that 10-minute guitar solo?), and customer comments (our Word of Mouth section). You'll even find full album graphics that go beyond the simple cover graphic that almost all music sites are limited to. Even in a record store you can turn a CD over to look at the back, and since you can't touch the product when browsing online, we 'turn it over' for you (then we turn it 'inside out').
Another innovation (I've not seen anything like this on any other online CD store) is the ability to view the artist credits on a particular CD, then click on the name of one of the artists who played on the CD to see all the other albums he or she was involved on. For example you can click on Brett Garsed's name to view all the CDs we sell that he played on, or click on Steve Smith to pull up all the CDs we stock that this great drummer has played on.
One additional point about our Word of Mouth section. Amazon was one of the first sites to feature customer comments with the products they sell. We think that's a good thing, so Guitar Nine provides a link to Word of Mouth from every CD page. However, sometimes it's nice just to be able to browse the customer comments for all CDs, hence a centralized Word of Mouth page that also holds general comments about the site, in addition to opinions about specific recordings.
Finally, not many sites are able to offer the ability for the customer to know exactly how many copies of a particular CD we have in stock. The stock levels are automatically updated whenever we ship (once or twice a day), so they are very current, and it prevents those annoying "Back Order" e-mails you sometimes get from some of the other CD retailers. Nothing is more annoying to me than working with a site that is selling you something they just don't have (literally letting you put it into your shopping cart, then giving you the bad news on the way out). So we've eliminated that possibility. Of course, when we are out of something, we'll always let you know (via e-mail, if you so choose) when it's back in stock.
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