In my case (Spain) it is VAT (21%) over the whole price PLUS Customs fees on the value of the physical media (thankfully PGMusic made clear in their export documentation that the physical goods crossing the border had a relatively small value!).

Then Customs did not charge anything but a small fee "for handling" (inspecting) the physical parcel, if I remember correctly. This is not always the case, this is very unpredictable.

At the end it is full VAT + extra costs + 3 or 4 extra days (it can be 2 or 20 in my expience with other imported goods) + never being totally sure if I'll ever receive the hard drive or not, when at at which total cost. The risk is that if for ANY reason Customs decide that I have to pay a premium, I cannot return my purchase. It happened to me with some goods that I sent to myself from UK to Spain when moving out!

So I was very glad when this morning I saw THIS (I am not totally sure it was available one week ago):

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This means I will not be forced to receive an IMPORTED physical drive to update or upgrade (or to buy from a retailer... a FULL Audiophile version at full price in an European retailer). I can just download. If PGmusic servers are not the bottleneck, downloading everything can be done in a couple of hours with my home-office connection. I've already downloaded sampling libraries with similar sizes (280GB in less than 1 hour).

For future years there is a new option on the table: The difference between Audiophile "plus" (only new content) or Audiophile "upgrade" (all content in FLAC, new contents from 2 or more years plus older contents for 299$). This means the normalization of using downloads for Audiophile.

Having the option cannot be bad.