Music Notes: Way Too Much Elvis Costello Music
After the Elvis Costello concert I dug a bit more into what albums Elvis had out, and realized that the entire Elvis Costello catalog has been released digitally on iTunes. Pretty cool.
There’s also some humongous album collection available as an Amazon exclusive, which includes 12 of his CDs. The selling point is the tremendous amount of music has been remastered.
However, a little more digging revealed that these remasters are essentially the same as the versions on the Rhino re-release from a few years ago. Each album includes a second disc with tons of extra tracks.
Essentially, my whole Elvis Costello collection on CD are older, Rykodisc versions, which contain extra tracks but nowhere near as many as the Rhino editions.
So of course, I’m now wondering if I should buy the whole freaking collection all over again via the Rhino double-disc CDs? At about 20 bucks a CD, that’s nearly $300 for mostly music I already have. Well, I have “unremastered” versions. Even though I’d love to have these remastered discs and the additional music, I’m a little hesitant to buy the same material all over again.
This issue of “new and improved” versions of the same old stuff comes up again and again, as we just got through replacing all our VHS tapes with DVDs, when HD-DVD is right around the corner.
Perhaps a trip to the library is in order…