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Have box sets ceased to exist?

The nice man from the phone company came this afternoon to fix the plug which connects me to the outside world, obliging me to move a CD cabinet and displace the hatbox in which arrived some holiday years back housing a Girl Group box set produced by Rhino.

Once fixed and gone, I remembered to check the mail, which brings far fewer offerings than it did a couple years back, as I fade slowly into obscurity and the music industry transitions into whatever this week's theory is that it's transitioning into.

But I realized something was missing.

Every year since I started getting on the lists I'm now slowly being removed from, every fall came the box sets. Lavish things, some of them. Complete compilations of some artist I'd never dreamed of caring of. So I never got Charlie Rich, which I'd still like, but I've got a still unopened Eagles box in the bookcase which holds the whole lot of them.

Not this year.

Now...there's absolutely no reason anybody should send me a box set these days, and so I don't mean to complain.

On the other hand, a recent tour of eBay suggests that the CD itself has retained far more value than I might have guessed (and if people actually pay those prices, I'd best get busy).

And it is holiday time.

So my question, to the assembled multitudes, is this: Are they still making box sets? Or is that one of the first casualties of the digital age?

And if they've stopped making them, do you miss them?

Me, I liked the packaging, but I never have listened to all ten discs of Hank Williams, nor, in truth, even to the whole Chuck Berry set I was kindly given by a woman at MCA more than a decade back. But it sits on the shelf, still, and when I needed to look up his version of "Hellbound Train," there 'twas. Which is why I keep them. That, and the packaging.

Consider this an open thread, should anybody wish to talk about their favorite sets, or the irreplaceable ones. Or not.

Tags: alden, box, sets

Comment by Ron Frankl on November 30, 2009 at 2:07pm: With all due respect, what in the hell are you talking about? Or, do you really mean that they've stopped sending promotional copies to the music press?

There were plenty of significant box sets this year, including the Beatles and Neil Young monoliths, Big Star, Woody Guthrie, 2 George Jones sets from Bear Family, Richard Thompson, Rhino's Where The Action Is! '60's L.A. retrospective, and that's just what immediately popped into my head. Are there fewer than there used to be? Sure, accurately reflecting the overall ill-health of the recording industry. But I'd hardly say that box sets were headed towards extinction.

Comment by Eric Reanimator on November 30, 2009 at 2:08pm: Best Box Sets:
Nuggets (Vol 1 and 2 at least)
Misfits (almost all you need from them)
Doo Wop
Loud, Fast and Out of Control & Rockin' Bones

I think the best sets seem to be genre covering sets. Rhino has done a mostly good job with sets. They seem to do best with sets that cover pre-1970s music. I suspect that the people who have put the sets of later music together might have been the wrong generation to get the mix right.

Comment by Jackson Rodgers on November 30, 2009 at 2:11pm: I don't own it yet, but I do own a lot of its constituent parts on vinyl, and I would say this is, without exaggeration, for my money, if I had to guess, the boxed set to beat all boxed sets, and it just came out this year: http://www.amazon.com/Good-Year-Roses-Recordings-1965-1971/dp/B0025...

Comment by Grant Alden on November 30, 2009 at 2:16pm: Ron...I'm not really a member of the music press anymore. So I'm out of the loop. Which was sort of my point, sort of.

Comment by Jesse Flores on November 30, 2009 at 2:26pm: Part of the problem is that Rhino, the great purveyor of the box set, has been DRASTICALLY pared down and most of their staff was let go. Sad.

The good news is that I just got a Hank Williams "Revealed - The Unreleased Recordings" box set in the mail from Time Life. Woot!

Comment by Barry Mazor on November 30, 2009 at 2:27pm: The trend may, in fact, be in the opposite direction. I wouldn't be surprised if within a few years lavish, upscale--which is to say, EXPENSIVE-- box sets are the ONLY CD releases.

Comment by Ron Frankl on November 30, 2009 at 2:28pm: So if there's something you really want, you have to, dare I say it, buy it? Just kidding, Grant. Given the number of high-profile box sets this year, I guess I was a little surprised by your initial premise. But it does seem possible that the number of boxes of esoteric or obscure material is on a downswing.

Comment by Grant Alden on November 30, 2009 at 2:43pm: Explaining to my wife that I need to BUY music is, er, difficult, given the stacks and stacks of CDs here I haven't yet listened to, and my present income streams.

Comment by Easy Ed on November 30, 2009 at 2:47pm: They still exist although the selection is sparse these days, especially in America. The new live Tom Petty 4 CD box set is retailing for twenty bucks which gives you an idea of where the market is. (There's a vinyl version of this too for $150.) Dave Matthews has a 3 CD/1 DVD set coming out and for his fans, price seems to be not an issue. AC/DC has released a 2 CD/1 DVD set for $25 that's cracking the Top 100 this week. Britney Spears has a $75 singles box set available....for what reason, I do not know. The most interesting import I've seen this week is a Shakin' Stevens' EP collection.

Box sets have been trailing off not only because the demand isn't there, but because there's few places left to sell them. With Tower and Virgin gone, only some of the larger indies are left to stock them. You're not going to see too many at your local mall store or even at Borders/Barnes. So it's an online business left to Amazon, which pretty much kills off the impulse buy and leaves it only to the real die-hard fans to discover.

I was never a box set fan, although I've certainly managed to collect more than a few over the years mostly from the kindness of music biz associates. The problem is that although the packaging and liner notes are great, I've never seemed to be able to find the time to go through it all, much less be interested enough to listen to the forty-six alternative takes of this song or that one. Another problem I've encountered often is the sound quality. So many "remastered" tracks are so far behind new technology that within a couple of years you've invested in something that sounds about as good as an eight track tape. The Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys, Elvis all come to mind with multiple remasters and endless versions of the same stuff. Then again...we used to call this unplanned obsolescence a "marketing strategy".

Anyway, I just checked the closet to see what I have left and it's pretty barren. Elvis' Hollywood Years on vinyl in a film canister is still there, as is a pre-popular Howard Stern set of radio bits. A couple Dead collections, assorted Beatles, Jack Kerouac and the Monkees....the last two from Rhino. There's a Godfather collection on VHS and a Snow White cassette box with a decorative plate. A plate? Time to check out eBay.

Comment by RP N10 on November 30, 2009 at 3:28pm: You'd expect some tailing off as the number of box settable artists is finite and a whole lot of them have been done. On the other hand, 2009 saw Vol 1 of Neil Young's Archives, a Jayhawks Anthology (does 2CDs and a DVD a box set make?), the Dead's mighty Winterland 1977 10 disc set, Beatles Anthologies, Stones Get Yer Ya Yas Out 4 disc reissue, Big Star box, Roky Erikson/13th Floor Elevators and doubtless quite a few more. If you have to spend your own money on these things then there are only so many artists whose work I would want to own in that quantity. Also in tougher economic times, fewer people can afford the kind of money that box sets cost.
The on-line download stores have some problems with pricing box sets and the observant consumer can sometimes find unintentional bargains. A few years ago I found the Free box Songs Of Yesterday on iTunes for GBP8; basically a single album price. A couple of weeks after I downloaded it iTunes wrote to tell me the Steely Dan box Citizen Dan was at the same price.