Originally Posted by Urban Hatemonger

The picture you see above is my own personal copy of Echo & the Bunnymen's Evergreen album. You'll notice if you read the top sticker that the album came with a bonus disc featuring every John Peel session they ever recorded. I should also point out this version came out just a few months after Evergreen was released and it cost exactly the same price as the original album.

Now I don't know about you but had I rushed out and bought the album when it came out ( Like most diehard fans would do) and then walked into a record shop a couple of months later I would have been mightily pissed off at seeing this. Thankfully I hadn't got chance to buy the album before this came out so I was lucky. As it happens the Peel Sessions disc is better than the actual album itself but thats besides the point.

Or course i'm not including all special editions of albums in this , only ones like the above that come out a few months later with a live disc or a remix disc or whatever. I have no problems if they're released simultaneously. Take AC/DC for example. When they released their 1991 'Live' album you had the option of buying a single disc version of the album or a double disc version of the album for a little extra. Had I heard the album before I bought it I wish I could have gone for the zero discs option, but never mind.

I should also like to single out The Who (again). For a band I love they seem to be cropping up in this list rather a lot. As everybody knows the original version of Live at Leeds only had about 5 or 6 songs on it. For the 25th anniversary they released an extended version of the album with about 11 or 12 songs on it. Now I didn't buy it when it came out but a couple of years after so you could imagine my annoyance when I discovered that for the 30th anniversary of the album they'd re-released it again , this time with the WHOLE show. Which makes you wonder why they couldn't do that 5 years earlier in the first place.

And while i'm on the subject of record companies ripping off people i'd like to deliver a big fuck you to the major labels for the practice of releasing one or two *Bonus Songs* on new albums exclusively for the British market so they could justify charging about £4-5 more for the album than the rest of the world and stopping shops from selling cheaper imported versions. Downloading illegally couldn't come here quick enough in my opinion.