MI Pro

so they are going to turn it into a sunday market with retailers all having their own stall and price cutting......anyone remember the old london music shows at wembley ? with price slashing galore by bem from brixton and sound control 6 feet from each other with the same stock ......lol

Sadly, price cutting and retailer 'posturing' is a fact of life at these type of shows. It reflects the mentality of certain types of store that have nothing else to sell (no services) other than on price! They're 'stack it high and sell it cheap' brigades that rip the arse out of this struggling industry!

And, it has to be said too, that whilst many larger brands insist on dealer 'minimum stocking plans' there will always be the temptation to sell at or near cost to keep the shop's 'turnover' quotas up... and dump slower moving products within those lines.

Our past experiences with British public shows, is that they tend to put on live performances during the day whilst the show is in progress. This has the effect of emptying the show area of public for considerable periods, thus reducing the EARNING capacity for all those exhibitors who have PAID handsomely to be there and SELL products.

This does not happen at NAMM. Live performances should be restricted to outside show times in the evenings, thus giving the attendees something more to look forward to. IOHO.

But Britain has a culture of shooting itself in the foot! The organisers need to think about their organisation of shows much more and provide MUCH better value to both exhibitors and attendees. This industry needs to get much smarter in attracting consumer's ££££, by giving more in returns and a fab day's experience.

In a recent public one day show in Manchester, we noted that there was a much stronger interest in high end products. The 'stalls' offering low end stuff largely took it all home again!
We sold almost as much in high quality custom ClearTone™ Cables as Dawsons did on their 6x bigger stand opposite selling the usual cheapo stuff... and their employees were buying OUR cables! What should that say to anyone?

Unfortunately parts of these posts are typical of the usual ill-informed comments prevalent on this site.

I can't speak for the drum retailers, but Absolute, Reverb, The Firm and PMT are at the shows in different capacities.

We are involved in Sounds Expo, which is the hi-tech side of things. Reverb are representing Arbiter's guitar brands, I believe that The Firm are representing brands exclusive to them and PMT are involved on the Rock N Roll side of things.

Hardly a "Sunday Market" effort! However, I'm sure that there will be some great deals available to customers on the day.

I'm afraid that I'll have to disagree on the comments about service. We offer one of the highest levels of service available to customers in this industry and consistently go above and beyond the call of duty to ensure that our customers are happy. I'll be the first to admit that occasionally things go wrong, but we ensure that problems are rectified as soon as possible at no cost to our customers.

I'm looking forward to Music Live as a great opportunity to represent our company to a group of customers who may not yet have heard of us and to make the show a success for all parties concerned.....

Kindest regards

Andy

Well said Andy.
Award Session has sold direct for years and cares nothing for reatilers.
Reverb selling Arbiter, I see. Do other retailers (especially Birmingham area) know about this?

Do other suppliers selling to Reverb know about this?

andy, my post, (number 1) is certainly not ill informed and i worked at music live on many occasions so have much more experience and knowledge than most retailers on the subject.......so you are all going to sell different goods are you?. the general public dont care who they buy from just as long as they get the cheapest price.

i agree with the last post, at music live you had sound control sharing with academy of sound and then they shared with turnkey when they owned both of these companies so it was really only sound control at the show.
the suppliers couldnt get enough of this as they threw stock at sound control on sor basis and sound control in return sold more in a weekend than most stores make in a year.

When did Guitarman last try to buy from Award-Session? All products are available to dealers with a trade discount.

However, some products are/were not for general retailers, being rather specialist, so direct sales have been the only way to get those products to market.

We would welcome stock orders from Guitarman for his store. We also offer our custom cable making service to dealers. But unless anyone calls us and asks, then I guess they would not know that. All he has to do is pick up the phone or drop us an email.

From 1979 to 1988 we made Session amps exclusively available through music stores, so we do care for dealers and fully understand their problems with sympathy. However, you can't expect us to go out of business waiting for dealers to enquire, when customers want to purchase our products. Like ANY dealer, we take the route of least resitance to earn our living, which is a God given right.

So, whilst 'many' (not all) dealers prefer to stick with the 'safe' big brands, producing high competition and resultant low returns, we have turned to the Internet to satisfy the demand for our products on a worldwide basis. We have no real need to complain and we pay our bills on time.

But, the door is always open to dealers. It would not make good business sense to shut Guitarman out. Call us chum!!

sc dominated music live at the expense of other retailers who never had a chance