About Special Albums

Metal_made

Metal_made

Trooper
I feel so damn frustrated, finally after going through a lot of problems, I bought Bruce Dickinson's solo album "The Chemical Wedding", a good album, but then one of my mates told me that the version I had does not contain bonus songs as "The Return of the King"

Here goes my question: Why do artists make better versions of their albums in other countries, like Japan? Why not making a complete version for all countries?

Also when I got Best of the Beast, I was happy because I saved a lot of money in order to buy it, but then again, I realized that the UK version was a double CD version, and I, got one with just one CD.  I find that very unfair...
 
According to DragonForce, to release albums in Japan, the artist needs to have an extra track.  I somehow doubt this on a skin deep level, there must be more technical terms and reasons behind it.

As for the "Best of the Beast" problem, I think the band tries to release various versions to rip off their fans ;)
 
In regards to Japanese releases, I found this bumph. Might go some way to explain a bit.
 
There is a thread in this very forum (unless the monkeys deleted it) that talked about that. The reason bands have special Japanese releases is because labels in Japan are very.... suspicious of outsiders and also cds are very expensive on their own. So to make up to the fans they give them bonus tracks. But it isn't only Japanese version. Kamelot added "Don't you cry" in French on their U.S release of Karma, Blind Guardian released Dens Mains (or something like that) in Spanish for the Latin American release of A Night at the Opera. Sonata Arctica added Mary Lou in ther Latin American Release of Ecliptica.... and the list goes on. So... you just have bad luck I guess.
 
Onhell said:
Blind Guardian released Dens Mains (or something like that) in Spanish for the Latin American release of A Night at the Opera.
Click to expand...
Meis Del Dolor?
That is on my version of the album :huh:
 
That's it! thanks conor. Yeah it's in all the albums, but I think it was released in three languages (French, English and Spanish) Depending on the market. My album has it as "La Cosecha del Dolor"
 
This seems like bad business on the surface for the record companies while also being extremely cunning.

It costs a lot of money to stamp a different master CD for each region or country; would it not just make more economic sense to have one standard version of the album? Record companies are there to make money, first and foremost, after all.

At the same time, numerous versions of the same album usually increase sales to serious fans and collectors. There are undoubtedly tens of thousands of fans who have purchased, via the internet or some other means, all the different versions of the same album.
Without producing any genuinely new material, the record companies can increase their sales 2-fold, and perhaps even more, by stamping a few different versions of an album and only selling certain ones in certain parts of the world, the "collector" value is increased and the foriegn versons can be marketed at an increased cost.

For example, American fans often pay a huge mark up to get the European and/or Japanese versions of a Bruce album they already have precisely ecause they feel their collection is incomplete.

Ingenious marketing, people. That's what it's all about. Artists and especially record companies want to extract money from you.
 
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