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Old Jun 22, 2010, 06:17 PM
Cedille Cedille is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2007
Location: Tokyo
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I've also been concerned about it. In most "official" soundtracks both prices are printed, but of my collections, some recent Cave soundtrack have no price information on the covers, and I do remember they only displayed the post-tax prices on their websites (because of that, the other day I myself wondered if the tax was included and had to check my receipt). In such a case, we have to calculate the pre-tax price by ourselves...

Actually, I'm less worried about how much work it requires than how it affects site users. Even if we manually fix the prices, we could take advantage of a script such as one Blah wrote for the new album submission form. Or now that we have many staffs, we can divide albums into a few publishers (or catalog stems) per staff. More importantly, if we're going to exclude the tax, our prices will become approximately 4.8 (=1.00/1.05) percent cheaper than everywhere else since the post-tax price is the standard in Japan, and it might be confusing. As most albums released before the tax was raised to 5 percent in Japan aren't available, much less those released before 1989, we could defer it until we finally implement ways to add multiple prices so that both pre- and post-tax prices can be displayed. We still have a few years before the Japanese government finally raises its tax once again, at the soonest. I'll be willing to follow the decision of admins and other staffs, though.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dag View Post
It's just a guess, I haven't looked into it. I was thinking the base price may not change inmediately, but over time and reprints it could be adjusted silently, because a taxed 3873 looks less 'nice and round' than 3900.
Oh I see what you mean. I thought of a case where a reprint had a new (cheaper) price setting that would become round numbers under the increased tax, but not a case where publishers 'revised' prices in a later printing, considering that VGM soundtracks weren't long run goods, but I agree it's possible. Maybe we should take a close look at the aftermath of 1997's tax increase.

Last edited by Cedille; Jun 23, 2010 at 12:11 AM.
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