Lost Shows...

I always find it very annoying when visual music material (such as live concerts and music videos) are not made available to buy on physical formats. Thankfully, a large part of concerts and clips by the artists I collect have been made available in some formats through the years.




That said, many concerts that came out on VHS or LD way back in the day remain on that format only. There are several excellent concerts that have never seen any official DVD/BR releases, which really is a shame. Here is a small selection...



Hopefully some of these will be released officially on a more up to date format! The Kylie and Diana shows have been "officially" released on DVD (meaning that some dubious companies were able to release them through loopholes - the quality tends to be below average on those releases). I have been waiting for the Pet Shop Boys concert for 15 years now, not to mention Madonna's legendary Blond Ambition show which has only been officially released on laserdisc - more than 20 years ago!

Music DVD's (like music in general) don´t sell nearly as well as they used to, "thanks" to the internet. The shows above can be watched in full on-line, and I know that there are many people that are happy doing just that. But I rarely watch things on-line, and of course the quality can't be compared to a well done DVD or Blu-Ray. Why not give us a remastered special edition of Kylie's Let's Get To It album, complete with b-sides, remixes, music videos and the concert tour? And how about some Janet Jackson special editions? She has a couple of tours that were filmed but never released and her albums are way overdue to get remastered and expanded editions.

Some artist have been doing this right - Erasure for example, who have released their early albums in a 2CD/1DVD box sets, including full length concerts. And especially for big names, releasing their concerts this way is the perfect way for fans to get remastered and rare material along with visuals. Packages like these will draw in some new audience, every big fan of the artist will buy the new release and the record companies make money on old albums and footage that otherwise just sits in the vaults. If it is possible to give artists (I use the term loosely) like La Toya Jackson special editions of their albums, then why on earth not do this for artists that actually sell???

The effort put into music releases has been on the down slide in recent years. Deluxe editions of new albums look exactly like the regular ones, physical singles have almost disappeared and very little effort is put into promotional materials. The vinyl comeback does make a little up for this but overall very little is being done to attract buyers to actually pay for their music. It seems to be the re-issue market that is offering buyers the most attractive packages (the recent Bananarama re-issues are a good example). Hopefully we will see more in the future, including ones with live DVD's being a part of the package.

I am off to warm up my fax machine - those silly record companies need a a piece of my mind ;)