Beatles Box Set a bust at bargain basement price

What are they crazy? Who wants to spend $560 on old music? Not many people apparently

Stephen Pate, NJN Network, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, September 10, 2009

The new Beatles Box Set is a big hit with the media who got copies of the $560 sets for free. It will not ring many cash registers though. Who wants to spend that kind of money on old music? The sets are being heavily discounted everywhere two days after launch. Wait, in a month you will pick them up in clearance bins.

The Box Set is not remastered. It is not in SACD or Blu-Ray audio. The stereo technology is old as in the 1950’s. Since most people listen to music on mp3 players the slight sonic differences will be lost on people. People with a decent home sound system want an improvement in music if they shell out $200.

The media reported on Tuesday The Beatles would make $1 billion on this and Beatles: The Rock Band Game by Christmas. With clearance pricing on the boxsets and few buyers for the game, that may be wishful thinking.

Who cares, Paul McCartney is already one of the richest men in the world. Beatles game: All you need is sales New York Post.

The essential mistake is thinking we want to spend big bucks to hear the same old music again. Reporters enthused “Young people would learn all about The Beatles, a new generation of appreciation.:

Wrong, teenagers already know The Beatles from the chick flick Across The Universe.

I have two teenagers at home and every Beatle record and CD known to man. They were watching rental copies of  Across the Universe so I bought them the DVD.

Now they are legit but they didn’t want to listen to my old Beatles albums. They are not cool.

They didn’t want to come to the Paul McCartney concert. He’s not cool. He’s old.

All the hype that is surrounding the release this week is being generated by copies of the mono and stereo CD box-sets that EMI records sent FREE to media types. If you get sent $560 of free product in big boxes, it makes you think it’s great and you write a glowing story. I’ll bet fewer than 5% of the reporters actually listened to more than a few cuts, maybe two CDs at best.

The ever caustic Bob Lefsetz got a copy. He was gushing over them late August. Get the Mono Remasters he encouraged his readers.

“This is the way you remember them. Not scrubbed clean, but emanating from one speaker in the dash, one speaker underneath the spinning wheel of your all-in-one record player. It’s not about revelation, but basking in the joy of the music itself. These are the CDs you want to buy to listen to while you’re having a party, while you’re cleaning the house. They’re more MUSICAL!”

Then the hipsters at Associated Press, Canada Press and Reuters got their copies, Obediently they wrote glowing stories about how we could relive our pasts by running out and buying ours.

I made an instant decision I wasn’t shelling out any more money on Paul McCartney this year. The Beatles Remastered with ancient technology due September 9

We went to the concert in Halifax and it was a great experience. Good concerts are like that – special, an event. 50,000 fans were thrilled to see McCartney in Halifax

You build excitement for a month. There is the party atmosphere, 55,000 people milling around eating bad food and drinking tepid beer. Other bands play like Joel Plaskett.

Then McCartney came on and wowed us with the live performance of a lifetime. He was great. It went on until midnight. The crowd went wild and we ate pizza on Spring Garden Road at 1 am. What a night!

I posted 8 videos of the concert on YouTube. The first one on Sunday got 8,000 views and the 8th got 223 views. That told me people had enough of Paul McCartney.

Here’s the first upload. – update. YouTube took the videos down.

It was over, the excitement, the memory. I played one album by The Beatles and then quit. No one really wants to listen to 60’s pop music anymore. It’s old.

I figured once the freebies were gone, the whole thing would die a death. It didn’t take long. Chapters.ca started discounting the stereo set to $220 the first day. Amazon.com is discounting them to $180 for Stereo and $230 for the Box Set Mono.

What’s with that mono eh? When you hear music in 7.1 surround sound for movies and concerts, who wants to hear mono like when we were teenagers? Only collectors.