It used to be that when Christmas holidays approached, many in the music industry celebrated the success of the CD box set. It was the gift that said both, “I tried to be more thoughtful than a gift certificate,” and “I knew you would never spend 60 bucks on yourself, so Merry Christmas.”
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In the LP age, box sets were not yet fully on the musical horizon. There were multidisc live records from all kinds of bands. (Yes and Leon Russell come to mind). Some of them even started to resemble box sets, like Chicago’s At Carnegie Hall, which can still be found occasionally in used LP bins. Elvis and Sinatra had retrospective LP box sets.
But when the industry switched over to CDs, the record labels began to fully realize that they were selling music to consumers who already owned the music on LP. They were willing to buy it twice. And the combination of increased consumption of prerecorded music and a high dollar holiday sent the CD box set to its apogee. The CD box set became a testimony to a band’s greatness, a good way to encapsulate a career, and a daggone great Christmas present.
Always around the beginning of November, new CD releases from big artists became scarcer than the hits on a K-Fed record. And simultaneously, increasing numbers of multiple CD release boxes, sometimes from various artists but more likely the music of a sole artist or band, would begin to show up on store shelves.
Some of those boxes were pretty good too, and big sellers. I still laugh at the photo inside the two-disc NRBQ box of the four band members standing in line at the record store waiting to buy the Bruce Springsteen box. The two Rhino Records Doo-Wop boxes were considered definitive statements, and were followed by the garage-rock sets called Nuggets. Some boxes had a very limited shelf life. The John Lennon four-CD set with lots of home recordings and rare studio takes seemed like it was available for all of one month before Capitol pulled it from distribution. The Beatles box set, with no new music, but all of the U.S. releases, separated people from 200-plus dollars because there was included a detailed history of every track. Savvy. Mosaic Records also had scores of obscure jazz performers, with very detailed liner notes, available in box sets. The Led Zeppelin complete set may be the biggest seller of all; although, it’s hard to find sales numbers.
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This year, there appear to be a lot fewer box sets than previous years, and they seem a lot more expensive. The employees of the record store that I visited recently seemed particularly uninterested in what the new box sets were, or whether any of them were selling well.
I have come to tell you. There is a new five-disc box of The Band, which makes their third box set, and this one seems a lot more interesting than the first one. It also lists at $100. Sony has packaged all of the 19 U.K. singles by The Clash into a box set, with bonus tracks, of course. There are new box sets from Slade and The Strawbs, who seem as unlikely as Perry Como to have a box. Sufjan Stevens has boxed together his five Christmas EPs, and his label, Asthmatic Kitty, claims “orders have far exceeded expectations.” Weird. There are also new box sets this year from Bruce Hornsby, Sublime, the New York Dolls and Roxette. Having trouble getting excited?
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If you are looking for someone green and nasty who lives on Mount Crumpet this Christmas, a likely candidate could be Warner Brothers Music CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr. With CD sales down $2 billion since 2000, and downloading making up 17 percent of the music consumption in this country, Bronfman has said that his company deserves a piece of every download that originates from iTunes. If that’s the case, then the record companies stand to make a sack of cash off the pending deal between Apple Records (the owner of The Beatles catalog) and Apple Computer (the owner of iTunes) to put The Fab Four’s music online.
 Big bucks for The Band: Their new five-disc box set sells for $100. |
The big five record labels already take a cut of blank “audio” CDs. So fat, so greedy, unable to nurture an artist that anyone cares about, the major labels have totally squandered their opportunity to think creatively in music’s digital coming of age. One day, we are going to see the big labels take charge of their online catalog. At that point, you may no longer find yourself Christmas shopping in a record store.
