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Buying the past again: The Beatles v. Kraftwerk

September 28th, 2009 · Posted by Skuds in Music · 2 Comments · Music

Hot on the heels of the Beatles remasters comes the news that Kraftwerk are also re-releasing all their albums (not counting the Ralf & Florian albums) in a remastered form.  The weird thing is, and maybe it is unpatriotic, but I would be more likely to buy one or more of the Kraftwerk remasters than one of the Beatles remasters – weird because I have all the Kraftwerk LPs already and they are available on Spotify, but I don’t have any Beatles (what I have is on vinyl and therefore inaccessible to me) and can’t stream them if I wanted to hear them.Not that I am actually likely to buy any of the Kraftwerk CDs, unless they have a 5.1 surround SACD option, in which case I would consider Man Machine and Computer World.  It is just that I am even less likely to buy the Beatles.  It is not that I don’t like the Beatles, and I feel a bit of an Alan Partridge that I have several McCartney solo albums and albums by Wings ((“The band the Beatles could have been” – A.Partridge) but nothing by the Beatles.  The prospect just doesn’t excite me.

Also, I think they are over-priced for what they are: 40-year old albums, some of which clock in at not much more than 30 minutes, still being sold at full price, mostly to people who have already bought them many times over.

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2 Comments so far ↓

  • Jon

    It’s your loss if you don’t have The Beatles remasters..or even a single (prior) CD??? If cosst is your concer, at the moment they are not full priced. One can get each of them quite inexpensively at Target or Wal Mart or…you name it. Even the bos sets are not at “full price.” So what if some CDs barely click in at just over 30 minutes. They are separate pieces of art/work and are to be listened to and treasured individually. Each has a unique history of just what the band was doing at a particular point. It just wouldn’t do, for example, to combine A Hard Day’s Night with Beatles For sale or Help…all done within one year. They show the growth of the band before they hit their stride with Rubber Soul, Revolver, Pepper, and Abbey Road. Each are major achievments and oh so different from each other. So don’t get them if that is your position, for whatever reason, but you are missing out. Big time!

  • Henry

    Alternatively, you can save yourself a packet by simply downloading the albums from a torrent site.

    You can always buy any that you really like after listening to them – after all Sir Paul and Yoko are probably down to their last few squillion so you wouldn’t want to be robbing them and Sir Paul did have to hand over a sizable portion of his hard-earned to that one-legged nutter some time ago.