Bonus tracks, demos, live cuts, half finished songs, repackaged, reissused, special edition, deluxe edition… When does it end? I was recently faced with a tough decision; my band was releasing and album on iTunes and online, for just about $160 more we could re-release our three old records and some recent studio outtakes aswell digitally. I toyed with the idea of getting the tracks remastered and releasing a “Best of the Early Years” CD… I was ‘this close’ to doing so when I started asking around if people liked the idea. A few people told me that they thought it wouldn’t be the best idea, that there is value in less. Why would people want to buy the new record and the old stuff and a million other things.. It’s the law of scarcity at work. I’ve always had a problem leaving people wanting more. But, there is value in less at times. Take the way recent record labels have polluted classic albums with deluxe packages and reissues and bonus tracks. I love that Asylum is re-releasing classic Warren Zevon albums, and as a collector I love having the 3 bonus tracks tacked on the end of the CD, but one might ask, doesn’t that corrupt the original tracking of the CD? And the Warren Zevon “Preludes” album… released after they found the lost recordings in a trunk… maybe that stuff wasn’t released for a reason. The Rhino reissues of all the classic Cure albums.. with a bonus disc of… trash… poorly recorded live recordings, bad demos, instrumental versions… why? is all that really vital? As a musician, I understand the desire to release all of those Fuzzy Warbles, but, do it as a compilation later on and don’t tack them on to your current CD. I know the idea is to get people like me to buy the new version of the CD… but, it’s bad practice. If you pollute the marketplace with bad rarities and inferior recordings, people will soon stop buying even the pristine recordings. Take two recent major label offerings, Justin Timberlake “Future Sex/LoveSounds” Deluxe addition (with nothing really new, just some bad remixes of songs already on the album) and Amy Winehouse “Back To Black (Deluxe)” — a CD that contains rarites and live recordings… a whooping five or six of them… wow.. Even major retailers are getting in on it.. The Barnes and Noble only edition of Neil Young “Chrome Dreams II” which contains a bonus CD with one track available on the NYA collections… The WalMart only edition with special packaging of the new Backstreet Boys CD… I guess labels are having such a problem selling discs that they need to expand the CD beyond what the producer and artist envisioned. And from the first two examples, only because there has been a break in releases from these megaselling artists… because everyone on Earth who still buys CDs owns these two albums, they’d better add some junk to sell more copies. How can you Indie Rock!er learn from this? it’s more important than ever for you to release only your best material. In an already overstuffed marketplace, quantity over quality is already common place. Stand out and release only your best material. Of the 21 songs my band recorded in the studio, we whittled the list of tracks on the actual album to a mere 13 songs. Yes, it’s sad to see the rest of the tracks sit in my archive, but, for now there is Value in Less. Besides, we can always reissue the album in a year as the deluxe edition with 9 bonus tracks.
December 10, 2007 at 10:32 pm |
In the digital age, it’s even more important for on-the-rise bands to choose wisely. There’s so much stuff out there right now and numerous ways of accessing music through the Internet that it’s almost impossible to weed through all the crap to find something decent. Music, like history, is cyclical, and we’ve come around to a time very similar to the ’50s and ’60s when singles meant everything. There were some great songs being written, but albums as a whole lacked a bit. Then, in the mid-late ’60s, everyone began thinking about albums as a whole, total concept. I like the single as a product. And I think EPs are the way to go for up-and-coming bands (aren’t we always being told Americans have short attention spans?). Maybe, though, in a few years we’ll come around to where people enjoy full albums. Who knows…
May 9, 2008 at 5:03 pm |
[...] done some reissues with some instrumentals and demos and things.. (see my earlier post http://indierocks.wordpress.com/2007/12/10/the-value-of-less-reissues-special-editions-rare-tracks/) — and they’ve done a few DVDs — the trilogy DVD and the Festival DVD — [...]