18 Tracks (1999)
0 Stars
1. Growin' Up
2. Seaside Bar Song
3. Rendezvous
4. Hearts of Stone
5. Where the Bands Are
6. Loose Ends
7. I Wanna Be with You
8. Born in the U.S.A.
9. My Love Will Not Let You Down
10.Lion's Den
11.Pink Cadillac
12.Janey Don't You Lose Heart
13.Sad Eyes
14.Part Man, Part Monkey
15.Trouble River
16.Brothers Under the Bridge
17.The Fever
18.The Promise
 
In 2010, John Mellencamp wrote a
scathing commentary on how the internet had killed the music industry.
Without going into too many specifics of the article, Mellencamp talked
about all of the negative things and changes that had spawned in the
last decade that had rocked his particular world (no pun intended).
Sadly, Mellencamp was dead wrong. The internet didn't kill the music
industry, the music industry killed the music industry. Anyone
who wants a case study need not look further than this "album" that came
out shortly before the internet began to change how things worked in the
business.
Springsteen had just released the epic, 66 song box set Tracks that consisted entirely of unreleased
music, all superb. What this package attempted to do, was to put
out a "sampler" of that album. This fails in many ways. First, you
can't really cherry pick when all of the 66 songs were as outstanding as
those were. There is too much to choose from, and using any sort of
"random number generator" would be all that you could use to justify
what would go on a limited sampler such as this.
But here's the real sin. This has three unreleased songs that were
not on the original Tracks box set. Why??
These songs certainly could have "fit" when each disc can hold 80
minutes of music. No, the reason was that someone, somewhere at Columbia
Records (we can only hope that it was not The Boss himself) decided that
they could easily rip off the public by making them buy another full
length cd for only 3 songs. This is the exact kind of greed that
prompted people to "steal" music once technology evolved to where the
sort of thing became possible. Fortunately, it soon became possible to
buy only certain songs (some of the time) and consumers weren't forced
to pay for an entire album, but nobody in the record industry was every
happy about that.
This album is nothing more than an example of corporate greed. Totally
unnecessary and a total kick-in-the-face for the hard working, buying consumer.
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