Naxos shacks up with Amazon.com

'The Naxos tradition of providing classical music to everyone at an affordable price is continuing through Naxos of America's exciting new partnership with Amazon.com. Customers living in the United States now have the option to buy Naxos CDs on the Naxos.com website through a special ordering system processed by Amazon.com (USA). With the combined forces of the comfortable, sophisticated atmosphere of classical music departments in retail stores such as Barnes & Noble, Borders, Tower, and Virgin, plus the convenience and ease of online purchasing through Amazon.com, Naxos CDs are now available to more customers than ever before. We invite you to explore our site as we add more and more titles to this great new feature!'

I received the same email this morning. Interesting business partnership. This will save Amazon the trouble of warehousing Naxos stock, which saves them money, of course. And Naxos makes more profit too. Cuts out most of the middlemen, at least so it seems.

I wonder whether that will cover Canada on Amazon.ca. Probably not.

The question remains, however, whether the items from their historical series marked 'Not for sale in the USA' will now become available, or, whether American customers will still have to import thiese items from the UK. Assuming, of course, that some smart retailer - Tower - has not already done that job for its customers in defiance of US law.

Tom Deacon

cduniverse.com has a good selection of Naxos titles (at least the ones available in the States) and are cheaper ($6.29 vs. 6.98 USD). Yahoo shopping is cheaper, but they are often missing certain Naxos titles (e.g. Kraus Symphonies vol. 4) for no reason I can discern.

Dave Cook

Absolutely. Good news for everyone except for Naxos' competition, who no longer have that domain to themselves.