Scene Stealers

The Broadway Scene Stealers CD's that I wrote about a couple weeks ago hit the stores yesterday. I planned to go out on lunch and pick them up, but before going out, I wanted to know where I could find them because they're not the kind of CD you're going to find at Target. I started with Best Buy, which is the closest to work. Years ago, and I'm talking early 90's here, Best Buy had a fabulous music department. They had just about any CD you could imagine, of any kind of music, but particularly showtunes. Of course they had the big ones; Les Miz, Phantom, Miss Saigon, Cats, etc., but they also had a lot of the lesser known ones, like Blood Brothers, Pippin, Song & Dance, etc. Starting in the late 90's, their music holdings started to decline in quality, and it's been a plummet to the floor over the past 3-4 years. Now we're lucky if they even have the big ones in their showtunes section. However, because it's the closest, I decided to check. I went to the Best Buy website and both CD's were listed, but when I did an inventory search, I could not find one single store anywhere in northern Illinois that had either of them even though the product description page said they were available for pick up in most stores. I then went to Borders' website, even though it's a longer drive and they would probably cost more, I could at least rack up rewards points. I entered the title in their inventory search engine, and it came back as No Matching Titles Found. I tried doing a keyword search instead of a title search and still got No Matching Entries Found. Up until about a year ago, Borders seemed more than happy to pick up the mantle Best Buy dropped when it came to stocking showtunes. For several years, they have had just about any Broadway related CD you can imagine, albeit at slightly higher prices. However, just over a year ago, they declined to carry See What I Wanna See when it was released, and since then, have begun paring down the Showtune section in most of their stores. They seem to stick to Broadway-only cast albums (although I did recently find the Lippa production of The Wild Party at a Border's, but that seemed to be an aberration, and I can only imagine they stocked Grey Gardens and Spring Awakening because they transferred to Broadway even though the recordings were technically the Off-Broadway casts) and Broadway performer solo albums, like Bernadette Peters and Audra McDonald, but they've chucked a lot of the smaller stuff, which is a real shame. I really thought though, that they would have had these CD's, but for whatever business reason, they've decided not to carry them. However, Barnes & Noble seems to be more than happy to step in and fill the void. The one I went to in New York was fantastic. So, I went to their website, even though there is no Barnes & Noble near work at all, I would have to stop by Old Orchard after. They did have both the CD's at the Old Orchard store and the Evanston store. Now, my roommate recently heard about It's A Bird, It's A Plane, It's Superman for the first time, and he has a thing for Linda Lavin, so he's been bugging me to get that CD (which I have never seen in a store, even the New York B&N). I figured I'd look that one up, and while the Old Orchard store didn't have it, the Evanston one did, so after work I hopped in my car and went to Evanston, only to find that the B & N had moved. That threw me at first, and I ended up driving around the block and finally stuck my car by the train track and walked back, and discovered that it had only moved across the street, I just didn't see it because of the way I had turned. Now this store combined all its soundtracks into one section (movies, TV shows, and showtunes were all mixed together), but what a section it was. Not only did they have the Scene Stealers CD's and Superman, they had Carol Burnett's That's Entertainment CD, Coco, See What I Wanna See, and just about any other showtune CD you could ask for. I was in heaven. It totally made the annoying drive through Evanston worth it (really, who the hell designed downtown Evanston? With all those one way streets, barricades, split lanes, they should be shot). If I wasn't careful, I could have spent my entire life savings at that store. I grabbed what I came for, painfully leaving Coco and Carol for another day, paid (only slightly more than what any of them would have cost on Amazon, and I was able to listen to them that night instead of waiting a week for the post office to decide to deliver them), and went home, where I found my Angela Lansbury CD that I ordered from BMG waiting for me. I went upstairs, left the Superman CD for my roommate, and put the other 3 in the computer to copy them onto my mp3 player, and not one of them had a CDDB entry, even the Angela Lansbury one which has been out for about 3 months now. I had to type every track and performer in, and submitted it so hopefully the next queen to buy them won't have to go through the same thing. I'm not quite sure how info gets submitted to CDDB, but you'd think the record labels would get that taken care of before the CD's are released. The same thing happened with the Spring Awakening CD (which I also got the day it was released, I probably am the first person to buy these CD's and try to look them up online), but the Grey Gardens CD did have its information in, except the performer for every track was "Original Off-Broadway Cast," which isn't that helpful when you want to know which songs Christine Ebersole sang. Fortunately, winmx lets you edit the tags, so I was able to change the artist on each track, but that's another cumbersome process. I would have thought someone would have tried to look up the Angela Lansbury CD by now, but I guess not. I don't mind putting the information in when I've got the booklet in front of me, but it's more of a problem for ones I get from the library that don't have a booklet. I had to search online to get track listings for Edwin Drood and Wildcat and then again use winmx to edit each file's tag since I had already copied the tracks without any information (they were track 1 by artist, track 2 by artist, etc.). These labels should know their customers and get a queen on their payroll to make sure these issues are taken care of before the CD's hit the shelves. Since I'm already doing it, I'll happily take that paycheck.