Oh, Monseur le Fopp, you are really spoiling us...

One of the odd effects of Fopp is that I now never buy any Strut compilations until they go down to £5 - they all do eventually.

― seandalai, Monday, 8 February 2010 00:58 (1 year ago)

Indeed! Fopp Nottingham currently have a whole display rack of Strut releases on offer for £5 plus free sampler CD. I picked up the Walter Gibbons and Bob Blank comps.

Loads of the £10 deluxe editions in Glasgow Union Street branch, two sides of a full rack pretty much - both older and more recent artists represented, so definitely worth checking out for interested parties.

fopp in union st, Glasgow has been utter shit for jazz,soul and funk cds for years now. It used to be fantastic for it. its just a crappy tiny section on the balcony inbetween floors now.

Got a couple of Ornette albums for £3 a pop in there a couple of weeks back - On Tenor and Twins. But generally, their jazz selection is poor. Ok if you want to plug the Miles and Mingus gaps in your collection, but rubbish for anything that's not on Columbia, Atlantice or Blue Note.

the blue note is nowhere near what it used to be and they also used to have a brilliant impulse section all £5 or under

That's true. They had a good Blue Note sale a couple of years back in which I picked up plenty of goodies. That probably cleared out their stock though. I remember getting a few Impulse! things cheap, but those all seem to have gone now.

Fopp in the late 90s was the basis of my soul and funk collection. Remember getting Stand! for a fiver and it changed my life (well, I was a 15 year old Radiohead fan). The stuff they had back then on vinyl was amazing. If only I'd been into jazz then - I've heard tales of people getting Su Ra vinyl reissues etc for a fiver. David Keenan has stories about coming across all kinds of rare free jazz stuff in the Edinburgh Fopp in Cockburn Street. The founder of Fopp was a big jazzer, so tracked down all kinds of stuff from warehouses.

yeah i got the heliocentric worlds of vols 1 and 2 on vinyl for £5 from fopp up the west end in the late 90s. A lot of my funk lps came from there too. They also supplied Tower with funk vinyl that fopp actually got pressed. once they expanded nationwide it went to shit and obviously went bust.

I really miss the old Fopp. I'll never forget going to Munich on holiday and upon returning going straight to the Cockburn Street branch only to find it closed. A sad and disorienting experience. The vinyl section downstairs played a major role in me starting to vinyl in the first place. Guy that worked there really knew his stuff as well.

There was a Fopp franchise in Stirling between 94-97 which was my first exposure to indie record stores. It was totally different to what Fopp is now - it was just a solid indie store, with a box of 7"s on the counter, zines, free posters, and all these cool records I'd never seen the likes of before - bear in mind all we had in town for new records was a really shit Our Price. My teenage mind found it impossibly romantic. Sadly they closed just as a really shit Virgin (now Poundland) opened in the shopping mall. But at least we had the fantastic Europa over the road - still one of the best SH vinyl shops in Scotland.

re fopp and jazz.
the bristol one used to be pretty good for jazz, however, there is now a glut of old classic blue note albums that are being pressed up by other budget labels filling the racks.
i guess these are recordings that have fallen out of the copyright rules and so open game for these budget labels to reissue ?
have to say, i aint interested in them as the packaging is often shoddy, and as we all know, a lot of the excellence re blue note albums is the cover art, and seeing as the cheapo issues replace the original covers with some crappy photo, i aint interested.

Yeah, Fopp have a bunch of those. They're pretty good value as you get two albums for one, but as you say, they look pretty crappy and the magic of the Blue Note packaging is lost. I've not done a like for like comparison, but I don't imagine they're mastered as well as the Blue Note RVG remasters. Worth spending a fiver on the proper ones if you can get 'em.

when that Stirling Fopp closed.... I picked up their entire mo wax/ninja tune catalog and just walked it right to the till..

prior to the original one in bristol closing, i did the same re Output
they had a clearout on, and the whole Output catalogue on cd was £3 a pop.

Glasgow Union Street is advertising a new "Swap & Save" scheme, where you exchange your CDs/DVDs/etc for money off purchases...

It advertises £1 per item swapped. Anyone else spotted this, or even used it? What will they be doing with the secondhand stock; selling it through Fopp or farming it out to other already secondhand-oriented operations? Is Fopp/HMV in any kind of cahoots with Music Magpie/That's Entertainment (which has also just launched round the corner in Glasgow's old Tower premises).

they've had this in the bristol shop for a while now.
they sell the trade ins for £2 in a separate rack.
bought a couple : villalobos fabric, and elvis nbc tv special.

Thanks Mark. Does it appear to be pretty much an automated operation? As in, everything handed in is bought for a pound, sold for two pounds, rather than being individually evaluated for value/rarity? It's a surprisingly low mark up/high value paid, when one considers the prices offered by, for example, cash converters and music magpie.

do music magpie offer 50p then sell for £8?

Presumably there's a maximum amount for a new item, off.

It's not like you could take in 15 old Robbie/take that CDs and get the new J&MC deluxe set for nowt?

Does it appear to be pretty much an automated operation? As in, everything handed in is bought for a pound, sold for two pounds, rather than being individually evaluated for value/rarity?

seems pretty straightforward.
last week i saw someone trade in a pile of stuff, and they quickly checked for scratches on disc and that was about it, they bought everything for £1 irrespective of the artist/album.

I take it you can only use it as credit for purchasing in store?

wasn't watching that closely. sorry.

A 2x mark-up is relatively low for secondhand, I believe, especially if it is done as a blanket thing, because you'll often be paying over the odds for ubiquitous mainstream items that wouldn't sell especially easily at £2 secondhand (cf. hundreds of listings on Amazon starting at a penny + shipping for almost any big selling CD album of the last x years). Cash Converters & Music Magpie for example generally pay <50p per item (for run-of-the-mill things), but would sell at >£2. You can try Music Magpie here... http://www.musicmagpie.co.uk/index.asp

Anyway, I'm very interested to see how this pans out here in Glasgow, on many fronts...

Swapping old CDs for £1 a pop seems very appealing, as does £2 secondhand trawling. Which of course points to their strategy being sound on at least one very important point; drawing in customers...

In fairness if it's a credit only deal it'll probably work out much less than a pound a disc.

£1 for decent cds is a rip-off tho. Thats if they get any.

That's where a blanket price falls down; it's easy to implement, but the customer is ripped off for 'good/rare/valuable' cds, while the shop is ripping itself off when folks bring in Natalie Imbruglia, Beverly Knight, Take That, any older chart cd etc etc etc...

£1 for decent cds is a rip-off tho. Thats if they get any.

So don't take in decent stuff ffs.

oh i have no intention in doing that. But some gullible people might.

if they don't care, they're not getting ripped off

but Fopp will still it for £2, even it it's worth more?

They might, because the time it takes them to check every CD to make sure it's not an original issue of "Lick my decals" would be more than the potential increase in revenue.

or something...

Barcode scanning linked to amazon marketplace prices should be easy to implement.

Big Eno deal on, presumably not just confined to Glasgow Byres Road. The remastered digipacks for a fiver and the rest for three a pop. So there's the song albums, plus On Land, Apollo etc.

Also some nice new jazz stuff - Prestige, Riverside, Original Jazz Classics stuff. So loads of Monk, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey etc. Ended up with Monk play Ellington, Monk's Music, Eric Dolphy Out There, Sonny Rollins Out West, and The Quintet (Parker, Gillespie, Mingus, Roach, Powell).

£3 for the jazz, I should add.

but Fopp will still it for £2, even it it's worth more?

Rare indeed is the second hand CD that is worth more than £2. Obviously there are exceptions like Decals but by and large there is practically no collectors market in used CDs.

Tell that to MVE.

I manage to sell CDs for pretty good money on ebay, but yes mainstream or unfashionable back catalogue CDs don't go for much if at all.

Now if they'd just put the eno reissues down to £3.

They have! Bought Here Come The Warm Jets, On Land, Apollo, Music For Films and Before And After Science from Byres Road Glasgow. These were all they had.

the cramps : songs the lord taught us
the cramps : psychedlic jungle

£3 each. at last.
been on a cramps crush now for a few weeks since i picked up off the bone, so well chuffed these were added to the cheapskate pile.

Bought Apollo and Discreet Music £3 each from Gower St. London. Fancy going back for few more Eno ones. Will prob try the £1 off with an old CD/DVD offer thing when I buy something reasonably priced.

Monsieur le Fopp in Covent Garden had many great bargains yesterday, such as a few BFI Flipside DVD and Blu-ray releases for £3 or £5 (I got Little Malcolm, Lunch Hour and Voice Over), as well of plenty of other similarly priced DVDs of interest ( Sleep Furiously, for example) in their special clearance bins. Bargain of the day was probably the Stevie Wonder box set with a few minor scuffs on the packaging for £5 (also available in perfect nick for £15, itself a bargain) but I somehow resisted this.

All this and I think I passed Marcello downstairs in Sounds of the Universe.

I was there yesterday lunchtime so it's highly likely! Sorry I missed you but my mind was on the curious vinyl there (all at competitive Sounds of the Universe prices of course).

Ah! You were very polite, said excuse me to get by and everything.

I see HMV have started doing the trade-in thing, so they have a big rack of crap at £2 each as well.

Perhaps they've got a deal to send them over to China for recycling into street furniture like all those Robbie Williams CDs

They've had some good jazz 2 for £5 offers on in Glasgow lately (and elsewhere I'd imagine). The Impulse 2-in-1s went pretty quickly (got Black Saint/Mingusx3) but there are bunch of Riverside and Prestige albums there: late 50s Trane, loads of Joe Henderson, Sonny Rollins and McCoy Tyner (got the awesome Enlightenment live album from 1973) etc

McCoy Tyner (got the awesome Enlightenment live album from 1973

incredible record, a+++ purchase

Yeah, first read about it on an ILX thread, so I doff my cap to yourself and anyone else who raved about it. Nice to have a proper copy. I'm also a big fan of Sahara, which I picked up a couple of years back. Saw him in Prague last year - free concert in Old Town Square - and while he wasn't going for it like on those classic sides, it was a classy set of Latin tinged post-bop with Gary Bartz on sax. There were a couple of other Tyner CDs there, so I shall investigate further.

Different thing:

In Fopp CovGard, they have a bunch of "X-Factor Karaoke Kits" for £5

What they actually are, is a fairly decent microphone and mixer. Decent for a fiver anyway, metal not plastic.

I got one a while ago at a 'outlet' for £10, did one of the ILX Xmas track vocals using it, not bad...