I was pondering this tonight upon the news of Prince's estate announcing a massive, 13LP + DVD or 8CD + DVD boxset covering the seminal album, Sign O' the Times.

It feels like we're in this period now where albums are getting huge, carefully curated sets commemorating anniversaries, or further exploration into important releases.

Look at the recent Exile in Guyville boxset, REM's Monster, Dylan, or Pink Floyd sets.

Is it to entice people to re-buy? Or is it actually really good musicologist dig material?

From my perspective, we used to get a disc of rarities on reissues. How excited we were for those Pavement or Cure remasters -- that either included a paltry set of outtakes or the tacked on live performance.

Of course there were huge looks into albums previously -- some of my favorites include the Sonic Youth (Goo, DN, and Dirty), or VU's multi-disc'r with Nico, and of course the sometimes tedious Pet Sounds boxset from the 90s.

So are we in the golden age of reissues?

I am currently anticipating the arrival of the 2-disc Gene Clark No Other reissue. Yeah, just the 2-disc set; I couldn't quite pull the trigger on the mondo expando 3 SACD, BluRay, LP and 80-page book set for $150 or whatever it was.

But to answer your question, I do think it's a pretty great time for reissues -- if you can afford them. They do tend to be a little over the top.
I am craving that 8-album Peter Laughner box, too. But that is also more than $100.

I would say so. Not just the deluxe stuff, just regular resissues of old LPs is 80% of Record Store Day releases are lately. I imagine that the record companies have the stats, mined the social media data, etc, to show that the majority of record buyers out there are (still) mostly those interested in the standard rock canon.

They also figure they need to do it *now.* Like, the 16 year old who loved Justin Timberlake's FutureSex/LoveSounds album in 2006 might want to re-buy it when they are 40 years old in 2030, but what kind of deluxe treatment would that album get? Demos? Remixes? Honestly I don't know...

Ok, so in addition to that my non-cynical answer is that the people who are running the show these days are now the same age as (and hopefully as music-nerd-cool as) me, and are like, "You know what would be great? (Insert artist/album here) getting a super-complete reissue - we need to put a lot of effort into giving this album from my formative years the respect it deserves."

a lot of it is tossing a bunch of half-baked demos and other cutting room floor fodder into repackaged "special anniversary editions" to generate more $$$ out of a stagnating back catalog

I found the 4 lp remaster of MMJ's It Still Moves for $18 the other day cause a corner was slightly dented.

But yeah it seems like there's a lot of super expanded editions of albums being reissued and I can't afford most of them.

Interesting that Bob Dylan and Neil Young went straight into the UK album charts at 1 and 2 respectfully and sold 85% of their units as vinyl or CD. The rest of the Top Ten was 38% vinyl/CD.

I don't know what this means but that does seem interesting.

I think it means for legacy (ie boomer or gen x) artists like that, fans are still more likely to buy physical media. This being probably down to the dual factor of being older and therefore more nostalgic for those formats and also having more money to spend.

I would have thought that we'd be past the point of massive reissues by now, but I'm sure we'll keep seeing them until they absolutely go bust.

There have of course been some reissues over the past several years that I've really loved, like the recent Stereolab sets and the Unwound collections. Numero's 200 series is almost uniformly great (Indian Summer was kinda eh). Getting Hitchhiker and now Homegrown from Neil Young has been a nice treat, and some of his archival live albums have been great, too.

There's been a whole lot of barrel-scraping, too, especially some questionable live albums and demos being pressed to vinyl when there was barely any reason to release them at all. Record Store Day seemed to really feed into that.

To add to the list, Tangerine Dream got a really cool, massive collection/reissue set called In Seach Of Hades last year.

I think you're right. I also think those legacy artists have had a huge amount of income from record sales stripped, and by opening the vaults, this is a way to sustain some sort of post-digital era income over streams.

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Hadn't seen this. Wow. I'm not a huge fan of the 5.1 mix blurays. While nice, it's just not a way I listen to music, so that'd be lost on me. I bought the Pink Floyd DSOTM SACD hybrid 5.1 when it was released. I wish they'd have released the Tangerine Dream as such, instead of blu's. At least then you could play it in a regular CD player.

Tom Petty’s Wildflowers is getting the treatment now.

Reissues are a mixed bag to me. If it is a hard to find album that gets pricey finding old copies, nothing better than a good quality reissue. But, I see a ton of reissues of albums you can find for under 10 bucks anyway. And they don't usually sound any better than an original so that always looks like a waste to me. I'll never forget flipping through the bins and seeing a $30 reissue of an Ian Dury album, right next to an original in great shape for 3 bucks. Ridiculous money grabs far too often. Usually unreleased material was unreleased for a reason. The last thing I want after listening to al album I really love is half a dozen throwaways songs that are tacked onto some reissues, generally middling stuff the artist never wanted to release anyway. But then you have reissues like an Oliver Sain album I wanted a copy of but I couldn't find a used one for under $100. So when I came across a nice reissue for under 20 bucks, I was very happy. The Dangerhouse singles box reissue where you could get all the singles that go for crazy prices in one affordable box was a great example of a good reissue. So, reissues good for things that are hard to find or expensive on the used market. Money grabbing reissues of commonly available albums you can pick up cheap anywhere with a bunch of useless bonus tracks, no thanks.