Riaan wrote
One thing is for sure though, they know how to squeeze the last penny out of their material!
You pay a price for being a completist! I've got 50 something titles and 70 physical discs of Richard Thompson material (including nearly all the Fairport Convention albums with him as a member, but excluding most of the soundtracks he's done and the discs where he popped up as a guest player on a couple of tracks). Last year I repurchased "Shoot Out The Lights" because a new edition was released with a 2nd disc of live tracks from the 1982 "tour from hell". There's a 4-disc box set that has one (
ONE!) track that I don't already have - every now and then my credit card starts twitching.
A DOZEN live albums (not including the DVDs, all of which I have). Maybe I should get a life :-\
And I think that the's market a lot of these re-issues and historic releases are aimed at. A lot of these long-running acts by now have a large enough following of people who must have it all that it pays them to dig through the archives to see what they can release. Also a lot of things go around on bootlegs and that's hard to stop, but you can released the boot-legged material yourself, probably with better quality, and trust that your loyal fans will shell out for the "authorised" version so that you can get a piece of the action that you can't stop.
Two more things occur to me
1) part of the motivation here may be to generate money for the estates of Syd Barret and Rick Wright.
2) some of this may be recordings that Pink Floyd actually have no control over. The best they can do in such circumstances is say "good luck" and count the royalties (to which they are entitled). EG Richard Thompson actually had no control over the re-release I mention above. It was put out by the company who bought the label that he was signed to 30 years ago. He also had no control over an earlier (recording wise) live album that Island put out a couple of years ago. He doesn't like the bonus tracks on the re-issue Richard and Linda Thompson albums that Island put out, but he doesn't own those recordings and so can't do anything about them. There must be stuff in the vaults that EMI (or whoever) paid for and thus own but which Pink Floyd never thought would be released.
Anyway.... it's free market stuff. They put something on the market, we can decide to buy it or not. I'm not going to go for these, but I know that there's a box set coming out of tracks that Thompson cut in various sessions for the BBC, and you can bet that there's money going into the piggy bank for that little lot.
