Essentially, it's a bit of a "You are the ref" situation in that there is a (let's say hypothetical) band who have a hard drive full of lovely, lovely recently recorded music. There's a record company who are willing to do the donkey work regarding a physical release pretty much on a no win-no fee basis, a few band members in possession of a full set of rose-tinted spectacles and working bank accounts, and there is an internet's-worth of easy-access download dropboxes. Whither the appropriate path to take, Massive?
One of the comments regarding the pay-to-play post yesterday ran along the lines that if you can afford to do it for free
then we, the audience, don't need you to (I'm paraphrasing).
I won't lie to you, the outcome of this may influence whether we go to Latitude this year or not or if we spend the ticket money on printer ink instead.

I'll post the full text in comments as it explains the scenario a bit more fully, or the original blog is here - http://www.therecordingbooth.co.uk/to-label-or-not-to-label/

Do you do it? Why? Is it nature or nurture?

When I was very young my Dad put the fear into me that if I as much as breathed anywhere near the shiny side, it will never work again. And so I've NEVER touched the underside of a disc on purpose (unless I was chucking it in the bin).

I suppose those who had parents etc that handled the underside wouldn't think twice about it, and would continue to desecrate their possessions with fingerprints?

And if you do fingerprint your discs, does it not get annoying when your movies pause from time to time or your music skips?

PS I came up with an "invention" last night. A £30 alarm clock with enough memory in it to store ten MP3 songs. Set it to play in order or have it play on shuffle. No more annoying DJs on the radio, or horrible piercing alarms. And when you get tired of the songs on it, just plug it into your computer and change the tracks. Simple. I would buy one.

Methinks: Is modern music, digitally recorded, mixed and mastered, compatible with vinyl? I ask because I've noticed that the few modern releases I have bought on record do not have the same high quality of sound, in fact it seems to be worse, it's as though the compressed digital signal is not enhanced by the vinyl format. Older analog (i.e. 1970's) recordings seem as though vinyl was the perfect form that projected the sound in a natural way but I can't see the point of bytes being converted to shellac, and that digital stuff is better off on CD. I'm curious to know if any of the Massive have ever noticed this. Or maybe I should ask the Nurse to clean my ears out again.

This is the way to do a proper re-release:
nice slim cardboard CD case with booklet of lyrics, artwork and photos
CD1 of actual album plus demos
CD2 of b-sides from the era plus unreleased tracks and versions
DVD of the essential (for fans of English guitar based rock) video Love and Poison (Live Brixton Academy 1993)
Live at the Leadmill, Sheffield 1993
Animal Nitrate at the Brits 93
5 promo videos for the singles
2011 interview with Bernard and Brett

cost - £10.63 delivered to my door
I'd have paid twenty quid for Love and Poison alone.

Next to come is the Dog Man Star deluxe, ah cannae wait!

anyone got any remaster/deluxe edition joys or nightmares to share?

Is anybody else joining in with this year's Summer Burn?

It's an annual global CD mix swap organised by the nice people over at funjunkie.co.uk

Having recently been to my first mingle and come away with bucket loads of fine CDs I think you lot will find it right up your alley.

I know it's Free and I shouldn't complain, but I can't believe that I'm the only one who's had a faulty copy of the March Now Hear This! CD as I've already received 3 replacement copies all with the same fault!
It appears towards the end of track 12 by The Radio Dept on their track 'The New Hypocrisy' in the form of a loud white noise type sound that last about 5 seconds!
Will someone please put me out of my misery and tell me I'm not going mad and the only reader who's had this problem?
Development Hell are good when I complain and keep sending me replacement copies, but they've all got the same fault on. Oh well, at least I've got that off my chest. Now all I need is The Candy Man back on the Radio and all will be well with the world!

A lot of people have been taking about this article in the last week. In particular this chart is instructive:

The data can be interpreted to say that the model the music industry's been working from is the peak CD era model and it's beginning to look like an aberration. The download era looks a lot like the cassette era in terms of sales. What sells is where the music is great (which in our case we do not have) and the medium of distribution sounds good. Look at the vinyl peak in the late 70s (the peak of classic rock, the acme of classical recording repertoire, artists and technique) and the CD peak of the mid-90s (multiple very popular acts like Madonna, the boom in popular classical compilations). Vinyl's decline started when they abandoned analog recording and mastering and started to use digital for that, so you got a compressed, badly miked, fucked about record that had no advantage over the similar horrible sound of CD but also got scratched. Cassettes sounded bad, had wow and flutter and eventually committed seppuku all over the inside of your Denon deck and ended up with their guts festooned over the grim little shrubs that crowd the sides of every A road and Interstate.

My suspicion is that MP3s don't sound good enough to inspire an emotional response towards the work or the artist and the music isn't that good. If we get back to easy acquisition or rental of full spectrum recordings with headroom and dynamic range (think FLAC or Apple Lossless), and the music also gets back to core values such as melody, harmony and rhythms that are neither pedestrian nor violent, we'll see an upturn. Right now the sales figures are a direct representation of the want of a reason to spend money on music.

Long ago someone on this site suggested binning the plastic CD cases as an alternative to selling stuff to make room.

I kept the CDs, the booklet and the backing card on these rarely played discs. Now it's like digging through a crate of vinyl (I imagine since I've never actually done that before), but in miniature scale.

NOTE: In case someone questions why the much underrated The Final Cut by PF is in there, it’s because it’s the 1994 remaster which has since been replaced with the 2004 version.

OK, I know Metacritic is more all-encompassing, but here's a quick & dirty "poll of polls" from (arguably) the big 4 non-specialist UK music mags that have annual album Top 50's - Mojo, NME, Q and Uncut. It's done by the industrial standard "1 point for a number 50 placing, 50 points for number 1" scoring system, and the 2010 top 10 (actually 11) albums turn out to be:

1 ARCADE FIRE - The Suburbs [by quite a margin]
2 PAUL WELLER - Wake Up The Nation
3= GRINDERMAN - Grinderman 2
3= JOHN GRANT - Queen Of Denmark
5 LCD SOUNDSYSTEM - This Is Happening
6 MGMT - Congratulations
7 THE NATIONAL - High Violet
8 ROBERT PLANT - Band Of Joy
9 VAMPIRE WEEKEND - Contra
10= BLACK KEYS - Brothers
10= MANIC STREET PREACHERS - Postcards From A Young Man

JOHN GRANT's was the only album of these to make Word's year-end Top 10, and only ARCADE FIRE, PAUL WELLER, GRINDERMAN, LCD SOUNDSYSTEM, MANIC STREET PREACHERS and (outside the top 10) JANELLE MONAE received votes from all 4 publications.

Some vaguely interesting "gap analysis" (artists conspicuous by their absence in some lists, strangely high in others) indicate that:
- MOJO especially liked PHOSPHORESCENT, but don't rate THE NATIONAL
- NME especially liked SALEM, but don't rate JOHN GRANT
- Q especially liked TAKE THAT, but don't rate ARIEL PINK'S HAUNTED GRAFFITI
- UNCUT especially liked DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS, but don't rate MGMT

Not sure if it's a good, bad or indifferent sign that 4 of these 11 have been plying their trade for over 20 years in one form or another...

Bloody hell, I bought the original ellpee, the first CD issue, the 25th Anniversary one, the one with Tommy and now this - http://www.planetrock.com/Article.asp?id=1976305&spid=35830

where will it end?

A video of 80's and 90's CDs intercut with modern remastered versions.

These days we have Spotify, iTunes and various illegal torrent sites. Even if I belong to a generation that actually buy CD, or at least used to, we may be the last. I realised a couple of months ago that I now usually buy CDs (like proper, the physical artefact, in a store) I´m already familiar with. I´ve either heard them on Spotify, maybe even had them on tape or LP when growing up or have just purchased them, er, elsewhere.

I used to go in to record stores after hearing maybe one or two songs on the radio, listen to it once in the store (remember that process?) and then think "this I could like" before buying.

Then recently I did this for the first time in what seems like ages, and only because it was a bargain. The Best Of Harry Nilsson, £5, two CDs, and of the 36 songs I had only heard three (Everybody´s Talkin´, Without You, Coconut). Also, being a fan of The Beatles I´d obviously heard a lot about, even if not of, him.

I must say it was money well spent. What a great songwriter. I find it hard to understand he is not better known. As too many before and after him he slowly drowned his talent.

What was the last CD you bought in a store without really knowing what you were in for?

Lovely on a sunny afternoon with all the windows open. A few years old now (about 2001?) It's really very good (and compiled by a certain Andrew Harrison, no less). OK, so there's some v obvious 'Chill' tracks at the front end but I think the inclusion of people like John Martyn, Fairport and Nick Drake amongst the likes of Kinobe, Groove Armada et al was a little bit of genius.Complete tracklist:

Moby - Novio
Groove Armada - At the river
Kinobe - Slip into something
Fairport Convention - Who knows where the time goes?
John Martyn - Solid Air
Underworld - Push downstairs
Moloko - Sing it back (Album vers)
Oasis - Half a world away
Nick Drake - River man
Grandaddy - underneath the weeping willow
Garbage - Milk (Massive attack mix)
Goldfrapp - Utopia
Talk Talk - Inheritance
Depeche Mode - Useless (Kruder and Dorfmeister)
David Bowie - Art Decade
Mercury Rev - Holes

So I’m listening to a Terry Hall compilation, “Through The Years”, on the commute to work this morning. Now some of the track choices might be questionable (“Really Saying Something” over “T’Ain’t What You Do”, the studio version of “Too Much Too Young” rather than the live number 1 hit?), but it’s a perfectly decent single CD overview of the man and his surprisingly many musical guises (Specials, Fun Boy Three, Colour Field, solo work, even Terry, Blair & Anouschka.)

However, what’s this nestling at track number 7? Why, it’s The Special AKA’s “Free Nelson Mandela”, a fine track to be sure, but one in which Mr. Hall was, I might suggest, not even in the same hemisphere when it was recorded. I’m far from the world’s biggest Specials or Terry Hall fan, but surely anyone with even the remotest knowledge of the band would know about this, so how come the clown who compiled this album got the job in the first place?

Any other evidence that record companies don’t know their artists from a hole in the ground, or howlers from people who just ought to know better…?

I think it’s fair to say that when talk turns to music here, it tends to veer towards the obscure end of the spectrum – lost talents, lesser known artists (old and new), b-sides, obscure album tracks, bootlegs and so on. Well let’s explore the other end – those tracks and artists that are so well-known and so ingrained in our DNA that we think we know them inside-out, maybe even to the point of skipping them when they come up on our music-players…

I thought of this last week because I had an iPod disaster (since sorted, thanks for asking) and was forced into borrowing the FPO’s iPod shuffle for an imminent journey without time to check or amend the track selection, and 2 songs in particular unexpectedly struck me during the trip, that for some reason suddenly felt fresh as paint…

Donna Summer – I Feel Love: what a record – brutally minimalist techno that invented the “soul singer over an electro backing track” template still in use today, and sounds as relevant next to Cabaret Voltaire as it does to Chic (a good trick if you can do it.) If this was released today it would just be too weird to chart, that’s how good it is.

Sparks – This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us: is there anyone here over 40 who doesn’t remember Sparks’ debut TOTP performance as if it were yesterday? Luckily the record is worthy of every braincell devoted to that memory, it’s ridiculous, baroque, funny, and unlike anything else, skating perilously close the edge of being a novelty hit without quite tipping over – amazing.

This isn’t about “guilty pleasures”, and I wouldn’t remotely claim to have “rediscovered” these tracks, they were huge hits and are classics for a reason, but what other great tracks do we think are worthy of reappraisal with fresh ears, the ones that are so much part of the furniture that everyone takes them for granted? State your case, send us back to our iPods!