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Re: Beatles remasters





On Thu, 19 Feb 1998, Mark Leaman wrote:

> Just wondering; how do you think that adding extra tracks AFTER the
> original material would compromise the CD? You could always stop it
> after track X, if you wanted to hear them as they were released.
> My thinking is: there's 78 minutes of space there to be used. Think of
> the fans, and what would make them happy. A happy customer is a customer
> who will buy again. What's wrong with that? Why didn't they use the
> masters for the first releases? Why not utilize the format to its
> fullest? To do otherwise is surely a waste.
> 
I must respectfully disagree with you here Mark.  And to everybody else,
I'm not trying to start up another one of those Who/Beatles debates.  If I
was to follow what you were saying to the extreme, I would put 40 minutes
of crappy music on a disc with 30 minutes of good music, just to fill out 
the full 78 minutes on the disc.  I could care less about the amount of
time a CD has, what I care about is how much good music on it.  Having
bought every single Beatles album, including Live at the BBC and the
Anthologys, I think the way they did it was the best way.

Whether you think the Beatles are better than anybody else or not, their
albums are known better than any other band in history.  To screw around
with them would be almost sacreligious as far as I'm concerned.  Why mess
with something that works?  I like hearing their finished product on their
albums and don't particularly need to listen to a bunch of outtakes.  If I
want to do that, I'll listen to the Anthologys.  Don't you all think that
Sgt. Pepper would be a little bit weird with a bunch of outtakes tacked
onto the end of it?  And oh yeah, why aren't there any outtakes on the end
of Tommy?  Aren't there like 15 minutes left on the disc?

As far as what you said about happy customers, last time I checked the
Beatles had sold over 2 billion copies of various albums, singles, EP's,
etc.  I don't think that the customers are showing any sign of being
unhappy.  ;-)

Bryce