Mitch Friedfeld, noting the passing of BMG Music Service, reminisces
that:

>I joined them twice, both times to take advantage of membership
>incentives that were too good to resist.  ...  I haven't bought a
>CD from BMG in at least five years.  Their selection, geared to the
>broader market and not the niche collector, has long ceased to have any
>interest for me.  And yet I can't help feeling wistful at its demise...."

I had a similar experience, including the multiple memberships.  I did
find items in their catalogue that were not geared to the top-100 market,
including some baroque rarities, and a few discs of serious modern (Berio,
Ligeti) music.  Their rather strange catalogue seemed selected by criteria
that were other than musical.  That was clearly the case with their
website, in which the appallingly bad search engine could not find about
half of their own CDs by such search criteria as composer or performer.
One had the feeling that a mail-order operation originally geared to
selling running shoes or quack medication had somehow accidentally
wandered into the classical music market.  But wasn't BMG connected with
SONY?  Maybe it was run by electronics techies who disliked music.

Jon Gallant
Department of Gnome Sciences
University of Washington

             ***********************************************
The CLASSICAL mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R)
list management software together with L-Soft's HDMail High Deliverability
Mailer for reliable, lightning fast mail delivery.  For more information,
go to:  http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html