SHIPPING INFORMATION: Customers in almost all EU countries can purchase our editions from their local music retailers. Our editions are also available in many countries from: STRETTA MUSIC | ALL SHEET MUSIC
We are also happy to provide download versions of our editions – please contact us.

Dear Customers in the EU,

 For many years, we have been pleased to know and serve you. We have come to appreciate you in all your diversity and all your many endearing peculiarities. We know many of you – and many of your countries – personally. To us, the EU single market felt like a global village, free of borders and barriers. That is how the EU should be!

Unfortunately, that is no longer how it is.

The new EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) is making it not merely difficult, but impossible for us – and for very many other independent EU traders without a corporate group behind them – to continue shipping freely throughout Europe.

You may have heard about this in the media. Since 12 August, traders in the EU have been required to:

1. Assume producer responsibility for packaging, including reporting obligations, documentation requirements and more. This is burdensome, but for us still reasonably manageable.

2. Register in the national packaging registers of each of the 26 other EU countries. This means dealing with 26 completely different bureaucratic systems and just as many waste-management companies: some handle the formal registration, while others handle the actual licensing. Twice a year, this means submitting 52 reports through 52 different forms or online portals. And every year, fees have to be paid in every single country – always subject to a minimum charge, which in many cases corresponds to several hundred kilograms of packaging waste. This is already almost impossible to manage.

3. Officially appoint an authorised representative in every other country where the trader does not have a branch – in some cases with the appointment requiring notarisation. This representative legally takes the place of the trader and assumes liability in that country for the trader's reporting obligations. Appointing such representatives costs money: in the first year, and approximately €300 per year PER COUNTRY thereafter.

These obligations apply regardless of how many parcels one actually sends to a country. For a company like B-Note, it may make economic sense in countries where sales are substantial. There are, however, no more than perhaps two such countries in the EU. For all the others, the situation would be that sending two parcels a year to Croatia would result in approximately €500 in annual costs and fees – or €250 per parcel.

Together with the necessary bureaucracy, which amounts to approximately two weeks of work over the course of a year, this is simply not viable for us.

We are therefore suspending shipments to EU countries outside Germany with immediate effect – and we do so with a very heavy heart.

We remain optimistic that the regulations, in their current form, will not last. They are simply too absurd. They destroy market access for small providers and deny customers access to many products – because it is often precisely the small providers who specialise in unusual products and are sometimes the only ones offering them at all.

To the EU, we say: Thank you for not seeing us. Thank you for doing the exact opposite of what you claim to be striving for. Thank you for profoundly misguided laws and regulations that nobody understands anymore, that nobody can realistically comply with, and that are not merely destructive but further fuel disenchantment with politics and with the EU. Nobody needs that in times like these.

But to the people and institutions of our countries and of the European Union as a whole, we also say: Thank you for living in countries where we have the freedom to say all of this. Thank you for a continent rich in culture and music, and for the importance that both still hold in our societies.

And finally, thank you to you, our dear customers, for your loyalty – in some cases spanning decades.

We very much hope that we will soon be able to serve you again as usual.