The deluxe version: artistic genius or unnecessary oversaturation?
There are stranger things than being a music fan in today’s world, but once you know a bit more about the commodification of music, it all becomes a bit easier to get behind. Or worse, depending on which way you look at it.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably already aware that Taylor Swift is one of the most prolific musicians out there. She gets heat for it, sure, but she also uses a lot of tactics she knows will get her sales. Like announcing five separate album covers, for one. Or a new record just a year after her last one. In the last few years, with Taylor’s Versions and new material, Swift is literally everywhere, whether you like or or not.
But special editions and fan-curated packages are nothing new. One of the biggest transitions happened during The Beatles’ reign when Paul McCartney pushed to include more fan-oriented things in their vinyl releases, like printed lyrics and stickers and other things people surely went mad about. Blonde on Blonde was pretty revolutionary as the first-ever double album. But we’re in an age now when all of it feels fairly on the cusp of being a bit too much. Which is basically another way of saying, most of us are struggling to keep up.
Someone in some corner of the internet recently said the whole Brat thing was just an over-glorified marketing technique to veil shoddy concepts of being a bit of an adolescent nuisance. It suits Charli XCX well with her acid-induced electronica. But despite the haters, it’s also a bit of a genius move, pushing something so hard and so fervently that people have no choice but to be a part of it, even when they don’t even know what it means. Or better, they haven’t even heard a single song (apart from random snippets of ‘Apple’, obviously).
But with the deluxe version being a huge part of this drive, or craze, as it were, it’s more interesting at this point in culture to look at those graciously slipping out of the whole trend. Historically, it’s understandable why bands like AC/DC never released a deluxe, mostly because it wasn’t seen as much of a necessity or as demanded as it is today. Believe it or not, some releases weren’t treated as a fully-fledged marketing campaign like they are now.
But more recently, some are still keeping away from the game by not giving their audiences such “luxuries”. As a Swift fan, you can almost expect a whole lot of everything at all times. But with from-the-vault-type records especially, there seems to be something of a contradictory view occurring all across the board, with some artists being all for it, and others shying away from the concept entirely.
Lana Del Rey’s only try at it was with Ultraviolence, showing a shift towards a more calculated move driven by artistic control and not wanting to exhaust audiences. That said, her albums run a little longer, meaning an extended edition would probably feel like overkill anyway. Harry Styles, ever the elusive side-quester, only has 34 songs across his three solo albums. No reissues and no more than 13 songs on each. Chappell Roan seems to have such high artistic standards for herself that we likely won’t see a sophomore record for years, not to mention extra songs.
Which brings us to the next obvious implication…is artistic value lost on our good friend, the deluxe version? With so many things to be said about it in a general sense, not to mention how much it ventures into the literal meaning of art, it’s hard to say. But it is interesting when you look at who’s doing what and why. And better still, it becomes even more interesting when you look at the nature of fandoms, and how that goes hand in hand with cultural movements, fads, campaigns and so on. And what people expect, or feel entitled to.
But to bring us back to what actually matters, that’s probably the point. Sometimes, if an artist has more songs that didn’t make the cut, it only feels natural to give listeners more to hold onto. But other times, the story they’ve created is already a perfect version of what it is, not to be tampered with, with unnecessary dilution or too much to ingest at one moment in time.
