HW: Recent v Old (revisited) A Howl of Derision

Carl Edlund Anderson scylding at CARLAZ.COM
Tue Apr 17 17:09:55 EDT 2001


At 21:47 +0100 17.04.2001, colm mcwilliams wrote:
>why can't EMI (they own virgin now don't they?) get there finger out and
>repress the charims cd's and while there at it repress "warrior" too?

The answer is that the market is currently flooded with great masses
of (let's face it) not terribly good recordings (or to put it more
kindly, fan-pleasing releases ;)   There is no incentive for EMI to
release Hawkwind back-catalogue into that kind of situation.

When your average punter who's maybe heard about Hawkwind and wants
to check them out goes into a shop he's going to see a bewildering
and fairly random collection of disks -- and the chances that he
picks an slightly more expensive (16 quid?) remaster with fancy
packaging (like the extremely nice EMI remasters were) is probably
less than him picking a grimy -sounding 12 quid CD.

_If_ Hawkwind had gotten it together to do the reunion gig back when
the EMI remasters came out (as was talked about at the time) and got
over their disputes and managed some semblance of a reunion tour as
well, _then_ we might have seen further interest from EMI is
releasing sexily remastered and repackaged Hawkwind classics. But
this, of course, didn't happen ...

Bewail it though we may, I suspect that comes close to summing up
EMI's position.

Cheers,
Carl

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
mailto:scylding at carlaz.com
http://www.mp3.com/Scylding/



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