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The Life of a Completist 2011-02-18 03:51:41
Time for a rant that's not about Apple: I like to consider myself a completist. Having recently gotten into Front Line Assembly I've feel into a compulsive need to collect every track put out by them... and then I discovered all of their side projects. But that in itself is not worth talking about. However, re-releases are something to discuss. Why do record labels do them they way they do? Particularly I'm looking at Cleopatra which seems to be unable to do re-releases without changing something in the track list in some way.
What annoys me the most, however, is when the label decides to remove tracks from the re-release. If this is due to licensing issues then fine, but at the very least don't make my life difficult by adding additional tracks to the release. This can be seen on Delerium's Faces, Forms, and Illusions album and their Syrophenikan album. Fortunately the former's bonus tracks can be found on a compilation disc, but in order to collect every song from Delerium I would need to get the latter album twice. It certainly doesn't help sources sometimes don't very clearly mark which tracks are on what releases. Lets not forget that sellers on sites like Amazon, Half, and even to a lesser extent eBay are usually un-knowledgeable about these quirks and thus make it difficult to find the particular release I need.
And then there are re-releases that are done for the purpose of transferring old recordings to CD. In the case of FLA, there are two CD releases that are missing one track from their source material. I can't really say much about the re-release of their Total Terror demo missing a track, but there was no excuse for the re-releases of Corrosion and Disorder. Especially when there is a re-re-release which drops yet another track, but adds a few bonus tracks. So basically I'm stuck buying the vinyl release of Corrosion and maybe even picking up both Convergence and Corroded Disorder.
Finally, what is up with all the regional stuff. Nettwerk seems to love doing this and is fortunately where my completism comes to an end. (I have no interest in tracking down 20 different regional releases of the same thing for some obscure remix. In fact I'm more looking for exclusive B-sides on the singles any ways.) Of course it's just as bad when the availability of physical copies is limited by the region (fortunately Dependent has free shipping world wide).
Also limited edition releases are also annoying, but much less so.