100% Pure Beef

*sigh* ... Can't you just feel the love in this blog? I know I can. So, what better time than now to break the monotony with some good-old-fashioned bitching and complaining? Yes, folks, it's time for my list of pet peeves!! These are the things that, as a faithful buyer of CDs for many years, have been getting on my nerves for awhile now. There are probably some things I'm forgetting, and some things I won't bother touching on here (such as CD copy-protection, which appears to have been put on hold recently anyway, thanks to
bad publicity), so by no means should you consider this a "complete" list ... but I'm sure you'll agree that it's a more-than-decent start....

• paperback packaging -- Sure, jewelboxes can break, but they can easily be replaced by buying empties, which are widely and inexpensively available. Digipaks, on the other hand, you're basically stuck with: the covers sustain wear and tear unless they're handled extremely carefully, and you're pretty-much screwed if you end up buying one whose glued-in plastic tray has a damaged hub that can't securely hold the disc. And the ones without a tray are even worse: I consider CDs an investment, so I'm much less likely to buy one that's got a shorter life-expectancy by being prone to scratching from dust particles every time I have to slip it in and out of some little pocket (to say nothing of having to put my fingerprints on the playing surface, which I never like to do). I usually tolerate digipaks, but the record companies have lost my business more than once due to CDs marketed in "pocket"-style packaging -- the recent John Mellencamp hits collection, and the John Mayer Trio's live album, just to name two.

• DualDisc-only releases -- The DualDisc is a great concept: an audio CD on one side, and DVD content (music videos, interviews, live footage, etc.) on the other. But, while most titles available on DualDisc are also available as a conventional audio-only CD, I've occasionally been forced to buy the DualDisc ... which is distressing because the format still has yet to fully win me over. I have to be extra-careful when handling them since both sides must remain free of scratches, smudges and dust; and while I've had no problems with readability in CD players (for which a disclaimer is always printed on the back, and which has steadily been a complaint of some consumers), the discs' slightly thicker nature makes them mechanically incompatible with one of my devices. I was happy to buy the latest "Weird Al" Yankovic and The 5 Browns albums on DualDisc, since those artists are really worthy of the format ... but, until the technology's shortcomings are fully eliminated, how about giving us consumers a choice?

• short albums -- I'm not talking EP's here, because with an EP you know you're only getting a half-dozen or so tracks. I'm a bit tired of paying good money for so-called "full-length" CDs with ten or eleven songs and/or a running time of less than 40 minutes. Sure, the songs on the disc are usually pretty good (I'm a bit easier to please than most listeners), but the album is over way too quickly. And why is it that U.S. music consumers are sold the shortest CDs? I buy a lot of imports, and I can tell you from experience that every other country in the world (especially Japan and Australia) gets more music on their CDs than we Americans do. Come on, record executives out there ... please give us at least twelve songs on an album, would you?

• fake albums -- No, not bootlegs or other black-market discs, but rather the knock-offs that are sold legally here in the U.S., to people who either don't know or don't care that they're not getting the original recordings. Shameless "tribute" albums to a single artist, those silly sanitized-for-overprotective-parents "Kidz Bop" CDs, and current-Top-40 "performed by The Sound-Alikes [or some other equally stupid pretend-band name]" compilations are bad enough, but what really steams me are those oldies compilations on budget labels which, if you look carefully, bear the dreaded notation: "new stereo recordings performed by the original artist or one or more members of the original group". I fell for one of those rip-offs years ago, and to this day am still holding a grudge because of it. I want the original recordings, dammit! This isn't "music snobbery" here, it's plain and simple good taste.

• upstart live albums -- I don't know about you, but I get a bit annoyed when I see a live album from an artist who's only thusfar put out one studio album ... Jesse McCartney, Maroon 5, and the list goes on. It's not necessarily a lack of talent that bugs me -- indeed, most of the artists concerned have plenty of it. Rather, it's a question of content; aside from the one or two non-album tracks that are thrown into the set list, wouldn't a live album be more interesting if the artist in question had more than a single album's worth of material to draw on? But then, the ugly truth about the record industry today is that artistic integrity has taken a back seat to profit -- the labels are trying to make as much of it as they can off of the artist's popularity before it starts to wane. That's my big problem with these early live albums: they have a distinct air of exploitation about them.

• greatest hits ... more-or-less -- Best-of collections have always been plagued with flaws, not the least of which is that they rarely take advantage of the 80-minute capacity of the compact disc. At best, they invariably and inexplicably omit one or two of the artist's more significant hits, usually in favor of more obscure songs -- or, even more annoyingly, brand new tracks (which I believe have no place on an album described as a "greatest hits" collection). At worst, we have fine artists like Melissa Etheridge, who crank out something like eight albums before a greatest-hits collection is finally released ... and instead of rewarding our patience with a comprehensive two-disc set, the label tosses us a sorry single-disc excuse for a best-of compilation. It was my understanding that the major labels are broke ... so why do they pour all sorts of money into pressing the discs and printing the packaging if they're not producing the best collection they can? But now, thanks to slowly increasing collaboration between the different record companies, we're starting to see more and more comprehensive, career-spanning compilations ... let's keep our fingers crossed that the trend will continue.