I was excited to hear about the new studio album,
Long Road Out of Eden by The Eagles, but was anybody else disappointed to hear that it's only available from Wal-Mart and Sam's Club? This is the first studio album from them in three decades, and it's only going to be in stores at Wally World. After the censoring of music fiasco from Wal-Mart, that's the last place I care to go to buy music. I guess those of us who try to support our dying local record shops are out of luck. I'm just disappointed in that choice of marketing, but I understand their attempt to get out from under the record industry control, but that seams to be going from one not ideal situation into to another.
Brad
Below info taken from...
http://eaglesfans.typepad.com/latest_news/long-road-out-of-eden.html
Title: Long Road Out of Eden
Release Date: Internationally, October 29th. In North America, October 30th
Where Can I Buy It?
In North America, the album will be available exclusively at Wal-Mart and Sam's Club. You can also purchase it from the band's official site. Right now, if you live in the US, you can pre-order the album and be entered in a contest to win concert tickets and get a free download of the first single. This deal is only available from the band's official site. If you live in Europe, you can preorder it from Play.com or from this German site.
Album Length. The album will be a 2 disc set and feature 20 songs
(Source: Glenn Frey, Niagara Falls Concert)
Q&A w/ Henley.
From
http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/feature/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003658087
Question: There is a commentary on consumerism here, so it’s not a stretch to go from that to talk about the Eagles’ Wal-Mart exclusive. Is there any kind of problem in reconciling the art and the commerce of this?
Answer: I certainly had some trepidation about it, but the business has changed so drastically. Wal-Mart is not a perfect company, but as I have said many times in print, they can't possibly be any worse than a major record label. My daddy was a small businessman and he was not a fan of big box retailers or chains or franchises. But this is just the world we live in and there aren’t many places where 60-year-old men, no matter how good their record is, can get this kind of promotion and widespread retail coverage. We are artists, but we are also businessmen and we try to live in the real world.
Some of my environmentalist friends are a little upset because we made this deal with Wal-mMart, but on the other hand I now have the direct line to the CEO of Wal-Mart. I also have a direct line and exchange e-mails on a regular basis with the two whiz-kids they have hired to make the company greener. They have a pretty elaborate and impressive plan laid out.
You really can't change things from the outside. We are certainly making our feelings known about what we believe as far as ecological stewardship and some of the practices of big business that are undesirable and wasteful, and I think Wal-Mart is making an effort.
Let me hasten to add, I am not thrilled with everything Wal-Mart has done, both in terms of doing business with us and on the environmental front and on the matter of some of their employee practices. But you could pick out just about any big company and say the same thing. We wanted to try something new. Everyone has been screaming let's have a new paradigm in the record industry; let's figure out a way to do this ourselves. Let's figure out a way to leave the big dinosaur record companies behind that have been robbing from us -- and the consumer -- for the last 60-80 years. Ever since the record business became big business, the labels have been suspect. We just thought we would try something different. Some people have praised us for it and some people have damned us for it, but that's the way it goes.
