The Beat Surrender

‘Special Edition’ is not the name of the latest boy band to emerge on the block, it is instead the title of my latest gripe and rant about something that is seriously wrong in the music industry.

It’s something that seems to be tolerated and at the same time is marketed by the record companies as them doing us a favour, when in actual fact I think it’s one big hairy rip off. At this point I’m not sure if it’s the rip off element or the fact they market it the way they do that upsets me more.

I’m talking of course about the record industries knack of shafting the loyal fan and cheesing off the people that get behind an artist from the start, you know the sort of people that you would imagine they’d want to keep happy. They do this with the re-release of albums as a ‘Special Edition’ or ‘Deluxe Edition’ as they are sometimes patronisingly called.

The music industry though is a bit like football, in that they play on peoples loyalty and any form of things being fair and in the interest of the customer goes out of the window. Just as there is an unwritten rule in football that says you can’t change the allegiance of the team you support, it’s similar in music, if you are a loyal fan of a band or a collector of their records then you aren’t going to stop buying them.

The Special Edition seems to come in two particular forms of evil at the moment and in that sense you have to applaud the audacity of the record companies for potentially selling the same album on the same format (usually CD) potentially three times to the same customer during their lifetime.

The first one is where an album from the last 18 months has been a massive seller, they’ve bled it dry for the singles and they then need to find a way to keep the cash cow going. Somewhere along the line it has become acceptable for them to repackage the album, add an extra disc in which features either some naff mixes, outtakes or a live CD and then sell it all over again.

This brings me back to what I touched on earlier. The die hard fan or even someone who is more casual but bought the album before the re-release now finds themselves in a bit of a situation. They’ve supported the artist by buying the original album, but in doing so they then miss out on the extra CD. As a collector, you would then probably end up buying the second album as well.

It’s hardly rewarding your support is it?

The second one seems to revolve around Anniversary re-releases. It’s ten, twenty, thirty, forty, years since the original classic album came out. I tell you what let’s do a Deluxe Anniversary Edition. Add in some ‘bonus’ tracks that weren’t good enough first time round, possibly do some re-mastering, get someone that nobody really cares about to spout on for pages in a neat little booklet and we have a new way to sell the album to either new fans or to the existing fan who bought the album on it’s first release.

Fair enough if at the time of release you do a Special Edition with extra features / tracks and set the prices different I don’t have a massive problem with that as you are essentially giving people the choice to make a decision at the right time to do that, but the above two examples are just pure exploitation.

One solution around the first example I’ve seen used once, but doesn’t seem to have caught on since (probably because it’s fair) is when Elbow’s label put a DVD with one of their albums about six months after it’s release. The band only agreed to this on the proviso that the DVD was also made available by mail order from the website at a low price, so that anyone who had bought the original album could send off to get hold of the DVD to accompany the album.

Now that seems reasonable doesn’t it?

So what can we the music buying public do to get the message across that this isn’t fair and that we aren’t standing for it?

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