http://www4.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=25136
somebody says from the above link (am i allowed to paste this?):
BMG and Columbia got their asses sued off a year or two ago and things are much better now. I'm a member of BMG now and like it very much. Here's how it works:
There are no mailings to return. If you don't want them to, BMG will never send you any physical mail. All you have to do is visit their webpage once a month and decline a 'featured selection,' for which you will otherwise be billed about $18. They remind you by email and you have a couple weeks to respond, so as long as you use your computer regularlly, it's not a big deal.
The introductory deal is twelve discs for the price of one. You select five CDs for which you pay only $2.79 shipping each. You're then obligaged to buy one CD at full price (something like $15-18) in the next year, after which you can buy the remaining six discs for $2.79 shipping each. After buying the single full-priced CD, you are never again obligated to buy anything, and can easily cancel your account via a form on their website.
After using the introductory offer, BMG gives you seemingly random price specials, such as buy-one-get-two-free, buy-one-get-three-free, buy-one-rest-half-price, all-70%-off, etc. All of these deals will get you CDs at less than you can get them anywhere else, except maybe the used bin at your local record store. For example, with the 70% off offer, each CD comes out to $8.18 after shipping. A couple of the offers are very good, such as the buy-one-get-three-free, which gives you an average price of about $6.34. The best deal offered is the buy-one-rest-for-$1.99 deal, which if you buy a lot of discs at a time means the average cost can approach $4.78 per disc.
All of the special price offers are good for all the CDs in the catalog except some box sets. The box sets, however, are also generally priced very well -- for example, I picked up a Led Zeppelin set of all their studio recordings for about $40 less than I could find it anywhere else. Remember that shipping costs are applied per-disc even when multiple CDs come in a set, though. There's actually a helpful display on shopping cart section that calculates total and average cost including shipping of everything you're buying, so it's hard to get ripped off.
So anyway, it works out. I've bought probably about 120 CDs from BMG in the last year at an average of about $5.50 apiece. If you're prepared to work the system, you can get the same results.
Oh -- how are the discs? For the most part, they're indistinguishable from store-bought discs, but they're not actually exactly the same. Most BMG CDs are manufactured by WEA (which also manufactures lots of CDs for the labels) and most of the ones you'll buy will have a small 'manufactured for BMG' phrase somewhere on the discs, usually in with the other print so it's not obvious. Sonically the discs are identical, of course, but WEA seems to not have the best printing equipment. CDs with complicated artwork may have coloration that will look a bit off, if you're one to pay that much attention. Strangely all the discs from Sony Records I've bought are actually pressed by Sony and are identical to what you'd find in the store. (This is strange because Sony is affiliated with Columbia House, BMG's competitor.)
Selection varies from time to time. Overall BMG is a good place to buy CDs if you don't have a big collection already. You can find pretty much every mainstream act except the Beatles and a couple others in the catalog, and they usually have a band's full discography. But if you already own thousands of CDs, you're not going to find many rarities on BMG. No indie lables, though there are some CDs from smaller jazz labels like Impulse!.
Anyway, enough already. I'd suggest you and anyone else who doesn't have a lot of albums to join up. There really isn't anything to lose if you're planning on buying music anyway. And if you have the patience to wait for the best deals, you can get CDs for great prices -- what they should be everywhere.
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