Bonus Tracks

[JC_AOR]

I saw a news item over at MR.com about the new Sacred Heart album. What they're planning on doing is making it so the bonus tracks are only available on the CD, and not made available for digital download. Of course this won't matter as everything ends up being pirated on a blog somewhere anyway, but I do really like the idea of rewarding the fans who still buy physical CD's.

 

The latest Daughtry CD was an interesting example of this not happening, where there were 7 bonus tracks which were available as digital download only, meaning those of us who forked out $20 to buy the album as new, would then have to to fork out more $'s to get the bonus tracks.

[TIM (2)]

My views are pretty old-school on this one. IMO tracks are either good enough for the album or they're not. If you have 15 great songs then put them all on every single version of the album, instead of using 12 and then the others are bonus tracks. I don't think anyone should be rewarded for buying one version over the other (digital or physical), and that includes often having to buy the JAP version of albums as the main JAP labels always bully their artists to give them high-quality bonus tracks. There are some ridiculous examples of great songs being bonus-tracks (anyone who doesn't have the JAP version of PLANET 3's album is missing the best track), which just dilutes the quality of artists albums.

 

I've heard the DAUGHTRY bonus tracks and some are better than the album tracks themself. The album is pretty solid & enjoyable but would've been Top 10 material with the addition of these bonus tracks. It's all a stupid marketing ploy clearly, but IMO it backfires on the artist who ends up with an inferior album and disgruntled fans (who just end up downloading without paying the extra bucks anyway)....

[phaffas]

Ive given up trying to follow bonus tracks... just not worth the hassle chasing down an extra album for 1 song... just spend the money on a new album with 10 songs.

[heaven&hell]

Sometime this shit drives me crazy. Some bands will put a certain bonus track on a Best Buy only release and then another bonus track on a Target exclusive cd. Why not put them all on the same. Another thing that pisses me off is when I buy a cd and then it gets reissued with an extra track and a DVD like Chickenfoot just did. I wouldn't be a big deal if it was years later but damn why do it in the same year. It seems there's a whole lot of bands that are doing this these days.

 

Now I don't mind when bands reissue there catalog years later with unreleased bonus tracks wether they be unreleased tunes, live tracks or other versions of album tracks like Queensryche did back 2003. I have to say that they did some of the bst reissue/remaster job yet.

[aMetalhead1966]

I feel that record companies should take note of what KISS, Foreigner and Journey

have done recently..Give more bang for your buck...a CD of new songs, and

CD of re-recorded stuff and a Live DVD..$12.00...that makes more sense than

anything I can think of...

[hardrockhaven]

Sure, it drives everybody crazy (myself included). But let's face it. It's all about money. If they can get you to buy the album twice or pay for digital downloads of bonus tracks, that's just more money in their pockets for them. The "pure" love of music takes a distant backseat to the corporate money machine. Like phaffas said, it's almost not even worth it. It's only about 20% of the time that a bonus track is awesome anyway.

[Fat Freddy]

Bonus tracks are nice to have but I don't go out of my way to collect 'em anymore. In my early CD collecting days I drove myself nuts trying to get any and every existing track by certain bands, so I was buying up foreign printings, CD singles, etc. out the wazoo, which not only became very expensive but also damn near impossible cuz you can NEVER get'em all.

[Dead Planet]

I think I'm with the majority on this......there should be one version of a CD release unless a band is re-releasing an older CD and adding some bonus material....I do like the idea of putting music on a CD that is NOT available for digital download...

[Geoff]

Yep, I agree too. One version of a CD and one only. Bonus tracks piss me off too, as I hate missing out on songs from my favourite bands. Like Chris says, most the time you track them down and they're not that good, but then sometimes (like in the cause of Daughtry where if you ask me most those bonus songs are better than most on the CD... or Bon Jovi's 'Have a nice day CD) the bonus songs are awesome. It's annoying as f*ck trying to keep track of it.

 

The frustrating thing is, that regardless of how good the digital bonus tracks might be, when I buy the physical CD that's what I play and the digital bonus tracks get lost in the effort anyway, which is very frustrating. Because you don't put on your version of Bon Jovi's 'Have a nice day' and then go f*cking around trying to find the MP3s of the bonus songs to play right afterwards. Who'd bother with that?

[Swazi]

Bonus tracks are nice to have but I don't go out of my way to collect 'em anymore. In my early CD collecting days I drove myself nuts trying to get any and every existing track by certain bands, so I was buying up foreign printings, CD singles, etc. out the wazoo, which not only became very expensive but also damn near impossible cuz you can NEVER get'em all.

 

dito !

[Captain Howdy]

See in the old days you only got bonus tracks on Jap CDs because they had to make it more worthwhile for fans to buy CDs in Japan as the CDs were so expensive there (hence the reason the imports cost so much when you try to buy them).

I could accept that because there was a good reason behind it. I can even accept, to a degree the USA getting bonus tracks or Europe getting bonus tracks, because you can just import the version with more tracks, but two things they do now piss me off.

Firstly adding different bonus tracks to different releases (Jap, Euro, US and download versions all have different bonus tracks), and secondly the new Walmart/Target exclusive bonus shit.

If you are not in the USA, these albums then become impossible to get unless you either know someone in the USA, or someone sells them on eBay (probably for a silly mark up).

 

I think a perfect example was the last Hinder CD that was available at both stores, both with different extras.

Thankfully the Target one was only live tracks, which I dont care about, but if it had been different studio tracks, that would be bullshit.

 

Another thing I hate with downloadable bonus tracks is that quite often they are not available to download as a single track, and only become downloadable if you buy the whole album.

[Jez]

One version only with all the bells and whistles for me too.

[heaven&hell]

Yep, I agree too. One version of a CD and one only. Bonus tracks piss me off too, as I hate missing out on songs from my favourite bands. Like Chris says, most the time you track them down and they're not that good, but then sometimes (like in the cause of Daughtry where if you ask me most those bonus songs are better than most on the CD... or Bon Jovi's 'Have a nice day CD) the bonus songs are awesome. It's annoying as f*ck trying to keep track of it.

 

The frustrating thing is, that regardless of how good the digital bonus tracks might be, when I buy the physical CD that's what I play and the digital bonus tracks get lost in the effort anyway, which is very frustrating. Because you don't put on your version of Bon Jovi's 'Have a nice day' and then go f*cking around trying to find the MP3s of the bonus songs to play right afterwards. Who'd bother with that?

 

Don't forget the Pretty Maids 'Spooked' release that had the killer Jap only bonus tracks.

I wonder if they sold more Jap versions than they did Euro versions for that reason since I always read in reviews of that disc to get the Jap version(which I finally did recently).

[Geoff]

Yep, I agree too. One version of a CD and one only. Bonus tracks piss me off too, as I hate missing out on songs from my favourite bands. Like Chris says, most the time you track them down and they're not that good, but then sometimes (like in the cause of Daughtry where if you ask me most those bonus songs are better than most on the CD... or Bon Jovi's 'Have a nice day CD) the bonus songs are awesome. It's annoying as f*ck trying to keep track of it.

 

The frustrating thing is, that regardless of how good the digital bonus tracks might be, when I buy the physical CD that's what I play and the digital bonus tracks get lost in the effort anyway, which is very frustrating. Because you don't put on your version of Bon Jovi's 'Have a nice day' and then go f*cking around trying to find the MP3s of the bonus songs to play right afterwards. Who'd bother with that?

 

Don't forget the Pretty Maids 'Spooked' release that had the killer Jap only bonus tracks.

I wonder if they sold more Jap versions than they did Euro versions for that reason since I always read in reviews of that disc to get the Jap version(which I finally did recently).

Yep, that one is utterly essential. Glad that's one of the few Jap CDs I did buy ('cause it was all that was available).

[John Drake]

I'm with the one CD gang here.

What is it with all these rereleases. The band seems to come out with an original album, then they release a remaster of it a couple years later, then the lead band member says the remaster sucked I'll remaster it myself, then the record label says we'll remaster the album and put on bonus tracks.

I like bonus tracks if they're really a "bonus". What I mean is an LP album was released years ago, you can only put on ten songs, now they're remastering the CD and put on songs that were either not good enough for the album, or good enough but it all wouldn't fit.

I don't think the acoustic version of a song is a bonus or the live version is a bonus. If they have the live versions, why don't they just release a live album.

[Glen]

I can understand why this bothers some chappies around here and i agree that bands shouldnt rip the fans off.

 

But at the end of the day it doesnt bother me too much. Most of my discs end up on my ipod and i hardly ever play the cds anymore (except in the car), so i just download the individual bonus tracks from itunes.

 

Either that or what Tim suggested, which was definitely the case with Daughtry. That situation was just ludricrous and i bet that millions just got those tracks off a torrent. And who'd blame them.

[Geoff]

Either that or what Tim suggested, which was definitely the case with Daughtry. That situation was just ludricrous and i bet that millions just got those tracks off a torrent. And who'd blame them.

Yep, that's an excellent point. Some of these clowns probably think they're doing awesome things by f*cking everyone around, but in fact they're actually only pushing people into downloading even more. At least with downloading you can get all the songs in one place.