Sunday 15 January 2017

Buzzcocks show time's up for box sets

Buzzcocks' Spiral Scratch ep is being reissued. Great. Every home should have one. So is Time's Up, the semi-official bootleg album. Only completists really need that. It's not very good.

If you want both, that'll be £23. Fair enough. If you want both in a box, that'll be £50. I know. Although you do get some badges and photos and posters with that.

Remember NME's 2007 redesign which featured a "Weekly Planner catering for younger readers"? That was the magazine's death knell, a sign it had moved so far from its roots and mission, that its closure was inevitable. This box set stinks of the same desperation for the box set market.

The £50 price tag is telling. This sounds like a record company trying to bring back the 50 quid bloke, a term coined by journalist and magazine publisher David Hepworth in 2003:

"This is the guy we've all seen in Borders or HMV on a Friday afternoon, possibly after a drink or two, tie slightly undone, buying two CDs, a DVD and maybe a book - fifty quid's worth - and frantically computing how he's going to convince his partner that this is a really, really worthwhile investment."

50 quid bloke died, possibly with Borders and HMV, replaced either by Vinyl Revival Man (repurchasing those cheap CDs from HMV with £20 180g virgin vinyl reissues) or by 79p download man.

Whoever buys this box set will have a hard time justifying it to anyone if they have to. It doesn't offer anything like value for money.

The marketing team have subtitled this 'Mk 1 Box Set'. Let's imagine what will be in Mk 2 Box Set. All 3 studio albums? What about Mk 3 Box Set? All the singles? Well, if that's the case then Box Sets Mk 2 and 3 would be a reissue of the 5x LP 1989 Product box set. 

Then you could rightly say "ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"



2 comments:

  1. There's no high enough price for the Buzzcocks :).
    Yet we don't need these expensive reissues, I agree.

    (Time's up is good, anyway)

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    1. Fair enough, I bet plenty of people like Time's Up. Buzzcocks are my favourite ever singles band. There might be some reissue involving those, but Singles Going Steady - the title, the songs - is pretty much perfect so there's no real need.

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