How much do you pay for a normal music CD from well-known publishers? $30? $24.95? $19.95? Or maybe you buy all your music from iTunes Music Store. Recently I have seen shops like Deals Direct and Daily Deals selling popular CDs for $9.95 (+ $2 shipping).

Take Robbie Williams’ “Intensive Care” for example (not his fan, but that’s just an example I can find on both stores):

• Deals Direct — $9.95
• Daily Deals — $9.95

Both listed $29.95 as recommended retail price. The same CD is sold for $30.15 from Chaos.com (who said you can’t sell for more than RRP?).

How did they do it? Apparently those CDs are imported. The fact that Chinese characters are printed from top to bottom shows where they might possibly be imported from.

So instead of flying to Asia, and load your suite cases with cheap CDs, they have actually done all that for us by importing them. And 100% legal copies of music compact discs do actually sell that cheaply there (as well as DVDs and sometimes packaged software) to combat piracy. I always bring back some when I visit my families in Taiwan.

Now what I wasn’t so sure is, the actual legality of reselling imported CDs in Australia. Is that okay for consumers to buy CDs or DVDs that were intended to be sold overseas over here in Australia? It’s a bit like buying online music from places like AllOfMP3.com — they said they are 100% legal selling to the Russians (Your Mileage Might Vary if you are a foreigner, but we are happy to take your credit card).

I am pretty sure Deals Direct and Daily Deals have worked everything out, and in fact you can buy imported CD here in many places (but mostly are those that can’t be sourced from local distributors). I guess I am just looking for a confirmation that says “yes, it is okay” :)