Re: Catching up with 2009 / Tune-Yards

--- In [email protected], "schokofueralle" <schokofueralle@...> wrote:
>
> Ah. Reminds me of that Frank Black debut album which got the screen print treatment on vinyl only - those where the days. 

Yeah, it's a bit like that one! The screen print does look nice, but the music isn't really my cup of tea, what I've heard, anyway.

> But what really bugs me is the idea of giving different cat# to regular and special editions of the same release (more or less). The extra cat# for that ominous 'Omnibus Edition' which probably will only wear the BAU BOX 1 number is erm ... priceless! So by now that famous line "reissue, repackage ..." can be expanded by "renumber"! 

Ah, but then we hit a thorny issue, which we have done in the past due to extra tracks, and utter confusion - the BAUBOX (in fact, all the boxes) are different to the more 'expanded' versions of the albums - everything has a different UPC, which sadly uses up one release. The same will happen with This Mortal Coil, and with Lush, should those ones happen next year too.

> I am probably repeating myself but alongside the intriguing design approach the catalogue-system was an essential part of 4AD's appeal leading me to collect the whole output. Throughout the third decade all of this got ruined despite still having a few wonderful acts on the roster  (unfortunately these are counterbalanced by about 20 arbitrary releases that should have been on Beggars Banquet, Too Pure or rather Hut recordings for instance). 
> 
> "Would be so much easier if you were dead" 
> or became swallowed by Beggars 10 years ago (just imagine: no barcode clash, no moaning collectors and a good reason to give new cat# to reissues)! Makes me wonder how Mute collectors cope since Miller's sell-out.

The barcode clash would still exist, that was a 4AD issue, nothing to do with Beggars. If they'd sorted out the catalogue numbers with a long term plan (and let's face it, who would have a 20 year plan, back in 1980? It was about putting out good music that they liked, and being able to) and known that barcodes would be more regularly 12 digits than 13 (which again, nobody could have predicted, but our US office has to use 12 digits) nowadays, then we wouldn't have a problem. But, alas, we do! 

Unfortunately, (and 'Surfer Rosa/Come On Pilgrim' is a fine example of this), when reissues happen, you can't just allocate the correct catalogue number to them. Fortunately the Cocteaus reissues were okay, as they'd never had a GAD (bar Canada, I think?), but when you have a certain number of extra tracks, or two albums in one, they should have been catalogued a bit like 'Soundpool' was - with a combination of two numbers... and that's for royalty purposes. It's a pain, but again, it's something that back when the two albums were put onto one CD, nobody at 4AD could have forseen!



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