Thank you for the music, Warner Bros.

[The Curmudgeon]

Not an Abba thread (seriously, why have we never had an Abba thread? That needs addressing), but a Prince one.

When Prince was still with us, his unreleased collection of music was legendary. "The Vault" was where Prince would put his hundreds of unreleased songs and recordings, albums and albums worth of unheard music that would hopefully one day see the light of day. Hundreds of these songs are available in bootleg form of varying quality.

When Prince died one of the main talking points was what was going to happen to that unreleased music. One of Prince's major gripes with Warner back in the day was not only who owned the rights to the music, but what volume of music Prince could release. The "1 album of 10 songs every year/two years" format just didn't sit well with Prince. On his own NPG label he plundered his vault for "Crystal Ball", and it was three discs and three hours of stuff. That's how it should be done.

So, what's Warner Bros up to then? Well, they're releasing "4Ever." Not a fan of the title, bit lazy and obvious, but OK. And it's a two disc set of 40 tracks? Holy shit, sign me up for that.

Oh. It's another hits album. Even though we've had "Ultimate" and "the Hits" both in the last few years. Admittedly, those 40 songs include ones not on those hits albums, but this is all material easily available elsewhere, surely they must be putting some unreleased songs on there?

One. One fucking song. "Moonbeam Levels" is a fantastic song, granted, but is this really what Prince fans are asking for? Casual fans already have THREE best of albums, they don't need another one. You're sitting on literally hundreds of songs that no-one has heard, and you give us ONE?

Yeah, this is totally what Prince would have wanted. Fuck you, Warners.

[trashcanman]

Patience. They've got to hit up the casuals first to maximize profit, and casuals want another super duper hits collection with Purple Rain on it. That's easy mode. Fools and their money. To properly sort, arrange, mix, and finally release such a massive amount of material is going to take awhile to be done right, but I can about guarantee that they aren't going to sit on that mountain of gold forever.

[Ben]

I've hated WMG ever since their campaign 5-6 years ago against people who used Warner songs in their YouTube videos. Go after the folks who post whole albums and collect advertising checks, sure. But the rest of us amateurs who just use snippets for fun? Go fuck yourselves. YouTube deleted and muted millions of videos during that whole fiasco. Even for us schlubs who had purchased the music in question and weren't profiting from its use. Smart business people might call that FREE ADVERTISING. I don't know what Warner Music Group calls it, but me and a buddy burned a WMG effigy, filmed it, and used some thrash tracks from Nuclear Blast as the soundtrack to express our displeasure.

In short, to hear that they're coming out with another one of those stupid collections of songs that fans already own three times over is the least surprising news of the week. Trashcanman makes a good point about taking the time to do the unreleased stuff right, but that's IF they do the unreleased stuff. Something like Nirvana's With the Lights Out boxed set would be awesome. More likely, though, they'll just feed it to us piecemeal over the next 30 years and never let half of it out at all. I mean, you all heard of the "new" Jimi Hendrix album, right?

Fucking swine.

[trashcanman]

The "new" album that was all songs I already owned, you mean? Yeah, fuck that shit. I hadn't heard about the Youtube thing. Total garbage. The video game industry tried something like that too, but it didn't take, so now they offer up their games to pro Youtubers and beg them to play them. In fact, one major studio will ONLY provide early release copies to Youtubers.

[The Curmudgeon]

In fairness, Prince was probably worse than anyone when it came to his music being used. Remember that whole thing about the little baby dancing to the radio and "Let's Go Crazy" was playing? He got that pulled. The guy really, REALLY didn't like the internet using his music without his say-so. It cost him a lot of goodwill from genuine fans.

Anyway, I suppose it's inevitable that this happens, Trash, it's just a shame that Prince's first "album" since his passing is yet another hits album, something surely no-one needs. The one "new" song, "Moonbeam Levels", is genuinely great, though. It's baffling he never released it legit.