Online shopping is proliferating faster than you can type a URL. There are now a wide range of music stores online, but how do you know which one to shop at? I set out to compare the opera-CD-shopping experience at various online stores, and what follows are the results of my explorations.
The Ground Rules
I chose six major online CD stores to compare: CD Land, CDnow, CD Banzai!, CD Universe, CD World, and Tower Records. Of these six, CD Land dropped off my list right away when it couldn't complete my search requests without server errors. If you want people to shop with you, you'd better be able to let them shop! I compared the remaining five stores on the following grounds: ease of use, selection, and price. A logical next step would be to order from all five and compare service, but I'm afraid my budget doesn't currently allow that. Perhaps soon!
Ease of Use
Online shopping can be either a great pleasure or an immense frustration, depending almost entirely on whether a site is well-designed. As I mentioned, CD Land dropped out of the running immediately when I couldn't do searches without encountering server errors. The other sites didn't give me that problem, but they did have other difficulties.
All the sites have separate classical music search pages, which is a good thing, since the search terms used for pop and rock recordings aren't always adequate for classical ones. The search page itself is fairly standard across the board - you can search by composer, album title, work title, performer, and sometimes label. Where the stores differ most, though, is in what you get as a result from the search page.
To my mind, CDnow wins here. When you do a search, you get a list of album titles, with prices, and under the title (if you searched by work title, as I did), a list of the works on that recording that matched your search terms. Clicking on the "info" button for a recording will take you to a detailed information page, which generally lists performers and the details of the works included. This makes it very easy to tell if you're getting a complete opera or highlights, and exactly which singers are featured.
CD World has a similar interface, though not quite as nice as CDnow's. Tower Records also provides some detailed information, but the initial list you get back from a search does not include prices or other information. Thus you have to look at each one individually to get basic information, which for something like Figaro can be very time-consuming. Tower's search also seemed very slow
