A variety of methods – corporate tie-ins with bands and awkward attempts at assimilating into this new age of online audio activity – have been tried to keep the major labels on top, but the most exciting and interesting of the industry’s endeavours concerns CD albums. Even though bands have offered download-only releases (Radiohead for one with In Rainbows) and even swore they’d never release an album again (Ash), record companies aren’t quite ready to see the physical disc format die just yet. How can you attract ambivalent consumers to part with their cash and buy a CD? Simple: you supersize and spiff it up to the extreme. Excellent stuff for die-hard metalheads, but how to shift those album units that the band are teasing web surfers with? The answer: offer the engaged users the opportunity to get a grandstand, superdeluxe exclusive special edition of the record. Death Magnetic is available in a number of formats – download only, simple CD, CD with making-of DVD – but the king of them all is the £77 ‘Coffin Box’ special collector’s edition. It’s madly OTT; it’s morbid; it’s manna from heaven and a must have artefact for hardcore Metallica fans. Death Magnetic is not the only deluxe article to be unleashed upon headbangers this year. The riffacious and widely revered metal gods Judas Priest decided to craft a concept album themed entirely around the 16th century prophet Nostradamus. Alongside the hope that fans won’t download single tracks but rather invest in the overall ‘concept’ (especially considering that the tracks segue into each other in an unbroken flow), the mighty Priest also put out a special edition version in a big fancy box for those who felt the need to not only have the double album on CD, but spread across three vinyl LPs with a bonus poster as well. By going for the pimped-up product, die-hard fans feel special and superior to the average apathetic downloader and get a cathartic kick out of being loyal followers of the band. Furthermore, they also take on a sense of owning a piece of history and in years time will be able to dust off their original rarity with pride (or flog it on eBay for an absolute fortune). As a desperate measure to make sure that record labels still shift units, it’s increasingly likely that these composite bonus releases will become all the more common as bands seek to capitalise on the anal record collector sensibility of music aficionados. The Death Magnetic coffin box from Metallica is the most ambitious and excessive so far; where does it go from here?
