Answering The Clue Phone
by Sean Carolan

Chrysalis Records has announced a remastered re-release of Blondie's catalog, with extra tracks, liner notes from the producers, and other ephemera added for good measure. While Blondie's output sagged sufficiently as the eighties ripened, resulting in a final album (for that period, anyway) that no amount of retouching can enhance, the project itself is good news for both the record buying public and for the record industry.

This is a lesson that the DVD industry learned quickly, and well. A good movie can be made even more attractive when some context is available, and a borderline movie (or even a really bad, but endearing movie) can still be a good value if the customer gets what they feel is their money's worth. This can even include material that's unrelated to the actual work, but is linked contextually; film archivists such The Criterion Collection are masters of this art, providing supplemental material that links their releases to the tone and mindset of the times in which they were released. As a result, hardly a month goes by when a "collector's edition" reissue of a twenty-to-forty year old movie doesn't take the top spot on the DVD sales charts.

The DVD lesson extends to what doesn't work, as well. People don't like it when you sell them an item that has an artificial expiration date. (They don't mind it so much when there's a real one; that's why collectors prize their laserdisc purchases from the mid-Eighties, but not their milk purchases from the same era.) DIVX was an attempt to do just that, and it was recognized for the dismal swindle it was. Their exhortations to "Build a DIVX collection!" was really an invitation to fill a closet with silvery disks that each would require an additional purchase to ever use again. The public said "No thanks", but it won't be the last time the legal department tries to come up with a marketing strategy; even DVDs are saddled with copy protection and region coding.

Part of DVD's amazing success may be that the public perceives a DVD purchase as a better value than a music purchase. When you buy a DVD, you get an entire movie that you want to see in its entirety, and the entire movie industry is geared to making you take two hours of your life and devote it to their release. When's the last time you felt that way about a CD? And even if you did, radio is built to interest you in one song at a time. Do the math - a DVD costs $20 and interests you for two hours at a sitting; a CD costs $16 and interests you for twenty minutes at a sitting, and that's if it's a *good* one. If you accept those numbers as realistic, a CD should cost $5 (and "Now That's What I Call Music", if you're into that sort of thing, should cost about $12.)

Shouldn't the record industry be nervous about this?

The record industry has been even crueler to their classic releases; they release them with flimsier packaging, at a cheaper price. Even though every reissue sale probably makes them more money than they did on the initial release, little thought or effort is put into the "midline" offers, and it shows. Rhino Records tend to buck this attitude, but there are few others that have their insight.

CD sales are flabby enough that a new perspective is in order. The Blondie releases are a step in the right direction. Let's hope the music industry continues to see what the DVD industry has learned, and realize that an old release plus new (and cheap) insight might result in stronger sales to a public that might actually think it's getting its money's worth.

Though I'm still not buying "The Hunter".

©2001 Sean Carolan