The recent return to Number One in the album charts – some 38 years after its original release – by The Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main Street was remarkable for a number of reasons. Not only was this the band’s first Number One album since Voodoo Lounge in 1994, it was the first studio album ever to return to the top spot as a reissue.
While the quality of the core album has never been in doubt, the fact that the repackage sold over 31,000 copies in its week of release is testament to both the campaign put together by Universal and the quality of the release itself. The holy grail for Stones fans has been the long-promised second disc of unreleased material and it was this deluxe edition which comprised the bulk of the sales: the standard edition with the original tracklisting – remastered as it was – only accounted for just over one in ten sales.
The great success of Exile may be unusual for a catalogue deluxe edition but it does highlight a growing trend in the albums market. More and more titles are being released in multi-disc editions, or with extra content included in both audio and video form; sometimes these form the main edition of a release (such as Andre Rieu’s Forever Vienna, which comes with a DVD as standard) and sometimes – as with Exile – as supplementary editions.
The main changes, however, have been in the audiences they serve. While deluxe and expanded packages have often been seen as the preserve of the ‘superfan’, or have given context and weight to a reappraised catalogue classic (such as the recent 21st anniversary reissue of The Cure’s critically-lauded Disintegration), now they can be released simultaneously with new titles (as with the recent album by Robbie Williams and the forthcoming releases by Kylie Minogue and Oasis). In some cases they will follow a few months after to facilitate the inclusion of new material (as with Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster, which is essentially her album The Fame with a whole bonus disc of newer material).
As a result, the appeal of these packages has crossed over into the mainstream. Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black was one of the first to demonstrate this, with the 2CD selling over 103,000 copies in one week in the run-up to Christmas 2007 – more than the cheaper, concurrently available standard version. The Fame Monster is set to reach the 1m sales mark in the next few weeks – again, far outselling the cheaper, often-campaigned single disc edition.
Research from BPI suggests that more than one in ten of the Top 200 artist albums sold in Q1 were bought as a deluxe edition of some sort. Both independents and majors are now creating expanded editions of their releases for a variety of audiences, from the high-end collectors edition (perhaps best exemplified by Radiohead’s self-released In Rainbows box) to the more mass market deluxe issues of current titles.
The success of the recent Record Store Day demonstrated the great appeal physical product still has and a look at the release schedule sees forthcoming titles by Crowded House, Example, Gaslight Anthem and Christina Aguilera all due to be released with a deluxe option. It’s easy to forget in this age of growing digital sales that many of the biggest artists still have a large core audience who want a physical product. Well thought out and carefully put together deluxe editions are serving this demand and are injecting new life into what is, after all, still the most popular album format in the UK.