A good souce for HW cds/lps??

[K Henderson]

Dan asked...

>I stumbled across this link and did a search for Hawkwind and there were
>quite a lot
>of items listed.  Anyone ever purchase from them?  I'm curious.
>
>www.gemm.com <http://www.gemm.com>

Gemm.com isn't a 'store', but rather a large consortium of other generally
independant-type mail order businesses that have all agreed to put their own
catalogs into the Gemm.com system in order to provide users a quick way of
searching for a particular item throughout many a business.  So it's very
much like www.mysimon.com or any of those other availability/price
comparison search engines.  It's been around for four or five years, and I
use it all the time to search for things/dealers.

In most cases, you don't really need to order anything through gemm.com, but
you can.  (In some cases, they charge you a service fee, but not always.)
But in cases where the particular dealer already has their own secure server
order page, you can simply link to that site directly and order it as you
would have done if you'd known to go there in the first place.  I have, in
two or three cases, found something I wanted that only dealt through
gemm.com (had no site of their own), and found using gemm.com was no problem
(and it didn't charge me any extra for doing the cc transaction).

The main problems with gemm.com are making sense out of the listings - if
people spell an album title differently or abbreviate something differently,
the gemm.com search engine doesn't usually get them all combined into a
single listing.  And they mix different formats into single listings too,
which is a little annoying.

But it's a fabulous device to have available and I wish that more dealers
that I commonly order from were part of it.  (But of course, those are ones
that I know to check anyway....)  It's usually the things out of the
ordinary (apart from my main space/psych listening tendencies) that I have
the most success with gemm.com, because the best vendor(s) aren't obvious to me.

Grakkl (FAA)

P.S.  Note:  A few 'dealers' on gemm.com are the type that have bogus
inflated catalogs of stuff that they really don't have any idea whether they
can get or not!  You all know what I'm talking about...they just compile a
list from the various distributors that they procure stuff from, and they
only really know whether they can get what you want when somebody actually
orders one.  And then they find out that it's been deleted years ago, and
you get pissed off.  There's a place in Michigan (TCLImports or something)
that has this kind of catalog (muzos.com too, who I think are the same
people), and some places in northwestern Europe (Holland I think) that have
these sorts of bogus catalogs on gemm.com (which make it seem like they have
*everything* you want).  On gemm.com, they do list the 'fill rate' for each
business, so these bastards you can easily detect by their exceedingly low
numbers.