I think this extends beyond just this product to be honest...VMP in general has huge communication issues within their own company. Nobody seems to talk to each other and they seem to have no coherent plan for anything ever. Even with this release, nobody knew at first whether or not Horace Silver was in mono...how do you not know that??
Not sure how the other VMP x Blue Note albums were selected, but was very happy to see the lesser re-released albums like Charlie Rouse made the cut. I think overall, they have pretty great curation of albums all things considered. The curation was never really the issue with VMP. It has always been the other stuff that has prevented them from truly being "the best damn record club."
of course, but this went out of its way to be lacking in details, it was advertised as a feature
Yea--their curation is really good typically. Imagine if they cared as much about these releases (and all others) as other labels like Pure Pleasure, Sam Records, Music Matters, AP, etc did? The end result would be incredible.
A lot of things were advertised as features and have not been delivered upon. They even changed that foil/stamping detail in the past day or two on the site when they realized they fucked up. There really isn't a "learning experience". There have been no discounts, listening parties, giveaways or any other exclusive content as promised. They picked 6 albums out of 12 albums that Blue Note sent over and shipped them to me for $230.
I don't know where else the foil stamping might have been mentioned, but this is very ambiguously worded. Grammatically speaking, the "foil-stamped" here refers to "this set," which could be either plural or singular, but logically speaking, it immediately follows the mention of "7 LPs."
The part that really bothers me is that they went in and changed the website AFTER THE FACT when people called them out on it.
Others have said it on here but VMP fucked up the only part of it they were directly responsible for. And instead of giving people a heads up, they just expected that we wouldn't notice.
There is one user in the FB group that posts some awesome stuff about the history of jazz, how to distinguish between different subgenres of jazz, etc that appears to be original content. Chris Irwin I think is his name? That stuff is awesome to read and is the content that VMP should have been doing all along. Instead they are having members of the group do it for free.
I actually feel like I'll have plenty of positive opinions on the records and the box, despite what my entire post history may imply, lol. My problem there is, I haven't received them yet. Which isn't really so much a complaint as it is me getting antsy because it seems just about everyone else has.
My feedback would have been don't use facebook as the forum and instead create another forum but that was all before they nuked the VMP forum and deleted comments. Facebook is awful for the kind of "experience" they promised. But it is easiest for them to self-police and it's free for them.
I don't see the actual posts as being the problem. The problem is that they are using FB, which is notorious for having their algorithm that shows things in a scattershot order and makes it hard to see content you actually want. If they had used a message board or just about anything that wasn't FB, it would be easier to isolate things like post after post from the same 1 or 2 people of jazz records without any actual discussion content.
