Anyone know what's going on with GEMM Marketplace? It's gone!

Music collectors should be well aware of GEMM, the global music marketplace. I usually research between Gemm, Musicstack and Discogs when looking for old vinyl, and have been ordering way too much recently. But over the last several days, Gemm has been completely missing in action. Does anyone know what has happened? I found some old comments from a few years ago that they were having financial issues, but they have now just disappeared. I had one last order placed through there, and had received the Shipped notice before their disappearance, but still, it's a concern. Gemm's interface was clunky, messy and a pain to truly navigate the results, but they always seemed to have plenty of other sellers not on the other sites.

 

Can't connect either! I've done a lot of business with the sellers on GEMM and can't ever recall a problem with any of them so I'd miss this site.

 

Bummer!

 

according to a post on the Discogs forum 6 days ago..............
"For those of you who don't know Gemm has been in financial trouble for some time, today the website and database have disappeared.
If you are one of the many sellers owed money by GEMM do not expect to see it, Site owner Roger Raffee had emailed several people stating that he intends to file for bankruptcy and close GEMM down
It is a sad moment, GEMM was the first music marketplace, dating back to 1995, a true pioneer site, under better management it might well have become an internet giant and for a while it did very well peaking around 2000 with a turnover in the millions.
Roger fell out with co-founder and developer Jim Hall, Jim was ousted and no one managed the site's creaking infrastructure, GEMM was simply overtaken by sites like musicstack and Discogs, sales declined rapidly.
GEMM took the full payment from buyers, removed its commission and then remitted to sellers, for over 2 years the delay in paying the sellers has been growing and earlier this year the site ceased taking money, referring buyers to pay the seller directly by Paypal, payments of arrears pretty much stopped".

 

Roger Raffee (allegedly),
Owner GEMM dot com.
Thanks, Roger...thanks a lot!

 

Just received this email today:

Hello Scott,

After being in the internet marketplace business since August of 1994, and as you already know, the very first internet company to serve as a marketplace for vinyl records, CDs, and other types of music related product, GEMM has found it can no longer compete in a business where the bigger companies, such as Amazon and Google colluded to control which companies get exposure in search results, and have had a long history of keeping GEMM buried from sight in those search results. Regrettably, therefore, we have ceased business operations effective July 8th, 2015. You will be receiving a notice from the federal bankruptcy court within the next week containing information about submitting your claim.


Regards,


-Roger Raffee
(GEMM.com)


Thanks for using GEMM!

Regards,
-GEMM

Thankfully, I didn't get too burned over this, they owed me less than $100.00. In fact, I waited so long for payments, my last transaction was to use some of my balance to order from another Gemm seller (GemmPay), and I ordered and received two Beatles monos I had been wanting. I had a lot of work put into my seller page, everything with photos and descriptions. I guess I'll have to find another way to sell about 2,000 LPs that I've pulled from my collection.

 

Bad deal, all around. I have used them in the past. Sorry to see it go. One less place to buy OOP CDs.

 

This stinks on so many levels! Hopefully Discogs will stay the course and not go the same way - it would be a sad day if resorting to Ebay for used vinyl was the only option. Truly sorry for anyone who got burned with the sudden disappearance and bankruptcy notice.

 

That's too bad. I used to sell on GEMM and was just about to start listing there again. One of the things I liked about them was that I didn't have to use Paypal.

 

Yes that was one of the main reasons I used it too.

 

Sad news, many times you could find things other places just didn't have.

 

Oh crap, this sucks a ton!

-s1m0n-

 

So, we're down to Discogs and Musicstack. I hope these two manage to stay afloat.

 

A minute ago, I tried accessing the site to look for a certain out-of-print CD and got nowhere. It's sad indeed they are gone.
They have been THE place for me to find the little-known out-of-print stuff.

Thank you to the GEMM team for keeping things going for this long against a competition whose behaviour was sometimes bordering on being a cartel for attention.

 

Good riddance.

That's about the nicest thing that I can say about GEMM.

Oh, and he owes sellers over $500K.

http://www.musicstack.com/seller/gemm.cgi

 

Very bad. I have seen many online cd/records sellers disappeared due to money problems.

 

GEMM has filed for Bankruptcy on 12th August. I received papers from the US Bankruptcy Court on friday.
A truly sad loss to all of us.

 

This is a true loss for bootleg collectors. For years GEMM was my primary source for hunting down rare and exotic bootlegs. Many international record shops from across the world were on GEMM, some which I never saw on the other services.

The site was terribly outdated by web standards. I guess everything finally fell apart as the market for physical music has shrunk.

 

Sorry to see it go -- always a good resource, but it was amusing the way some dealers would have an album for $8, while another would have it priced at $600.

Sucks that they owed so much to individual dealers though... maybe with so many dealers in the mix, nobody took TOO big of a direct hit.

Listing things on Amazon Marketplace has gotten pretty bad -- had a guy buy an $80 PCI card for a computer, which I shipped to Miami, not realizing it was a reshipper sending it to Guatemala! The guy gets it, THEN researches to see if it's compatible with his system, which it's not. He claims the specs that Amazon listed didn't specifically exclude his system, and expects me to refund him WITHOUT him returning the product, because it would be too expensive to ship. Amazon takes his side, of course, so I'm out the money, I'm out the PCI card, plus take a hit on my seller rating because this ***** can't research and misrepresents his location. That pretty much wipes out whatever profit I've made in the past month or two.

 

Huh? Amazon should not require you to pay return shipping from Guatemala. Your return shipping requirements should extend only to Miami. I believe you can provide a prepaid return shipping label for Miama -> back_to_you and insist the card be returned. At least, if you get in front of things before it gets escalated to A->Z.

Once it's in the hands of A->Z you definitely have a chance of losing everything. You always want to be in front of a return if you can so that if it gets escalated you can state that you offered to pay to return it (from Miami, not Guatemala) and the buyer refused. In that case, the buyer would lose the case.

 

Yes a loss indeed.

I now primarily use musicstack and discogs like many others.

One other site which throws up the odd good item is www.cdandlp.com

 

Does anyone know who the seller "Mamma" was? I'm trying to contact them about a record they had on Gemm. But now Gemm is gone I don't know where to find them.

 

wow, that's quite a list of creditors

 

You're after somebody I believe to be called Gianluigi based in Italy. Although I seem to recall way back that the parcel from "Mamma" came via The Netherlands.

Anyway .... if you pop on over to http://www.cdandlp.com, look for a seller called "gmvrecords", then you will be in luck. I believe they have their own website; http://www.gmvrecords.com.

I seem to have more contact details too if you need them.

 

WOW! I remember GEMM! I still have two or three of their very early catalogs somewhere. I think they were even pre-Rhino Records.