WOW HD is an online store that mainly sells physical copies of pre-recorded music and videos.

History

Under its previous name, CD WOW!, the retailer began operating in the UK in 2000, offering CDs and DVDs at lower prices than the high street. In 2004 the company was taken to court by the

British Phonographic Industry BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) Limited, trading as British Phonographic Industry (BPI), is the British recorded music industry's trade association. It runs the BRIT Awards; is home to the Mercury Prize; co-owns the Official Charts C ...

, the recording industry association for the UK, for selling CDs at prices that often undercut UK retail prices by 25% as although the CDs in question were legal, many of them were licensed for sale and distribution in other markets and thus priced accordingly for those markets. The BPI, acting on behalf of its members, saw the lower priced albums as damaging to the UK and European markets and took the company's former owners Music Trading On-Line (HK) Ltd to the High Court, citing UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. This resulted in CD WOW! being ordered not to sell titles that were not licensed for sale in Europe, and claiming it had to increase the price of all CDs. On 29 May 2007, the former owners of CD WOW! were ordered by the High Court to pay £41 million in damages to the BPI for breaching the 2004 agreement over the sale of imported CDs. On 1 September 2007, CD WOW! was bought by Stomp Pty. Ltd. In May 2008, CD WOW! launched a new site design in the UK, Ireland and the US, and changed its domain name from cd-wow.com to cdwow.com. In September 2008 CD WOW! launched a new front end for all its domains including a new domain in the Netherlands. It also started offering cosmetics and perfumes on all the sites via its wowwoman.com domain. In September 2010, the ownership of CD WOW! was transferred to a new Australian company,

Elan Media Partners Élan Media Partners was an Australian e-commerce company. It was established in 2010 after Surrealus, a company run by Paul Uniacke and Edward Nedelko, who at the time owned and operated Video Ezy, Blockbuster Australia and EzyDVD under their ...

, which had acquired Stomp. On 20 February 2012, CD WOW! changed its name to WOW HD. Since mid-2015, WOW HD has been owned by DirectToU, LLC, who also operate sites such as deepdiscount.com and

Amazon Marketplace Amazon Marketplace is an e-commerce platform owned and operated by Amazon that enables third-party sellers to sell new or used products directly to consumers on a fixed-price online marketplace alongside Amazon's regular offerings. Using Amazon M ...

eBay eBay Inc. ( , often stylized as ebay) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that allows users to buy or view items via retail sales through online marketplaces and websites in 190 markets worldwide. ...

seller All Your Music.

Business

WOW HD offers customers three ways to pay: through its own checkout using a credit or

debit card A debit card, also known as a check card or bank card, is a payment card that can be used in place of cash to make purchases. The card usually consists of the bank's name, a card number, the cardholder's name, and an expiration date, on either ...

, through

PayPal PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support E-commerce payment system, online money transfers; it serves as an electronic alter ...

, or through Google Checkout, so no sign-in is needed to make a purchase.

References

{{Reflist

External links

WOW HD
Online music stores of the United Kingdom Retail companies established in 2000 Video game retailers in the United Kingdom