Now, if none of that stuff is planned, forgive me because you see that even as a Beatles fan, it would take two of me to care less. That's 4oo lbs of apathy there, Chester.
When I first moved to Ontario and landed a real paying gig, every payday I would deposit my check and then go to the HMV in the Upper Canada Mall in Newmaket and pick up one or two of the Rykodisc Elvis Costello remasters, which I bought pretty much in order of album quality (the last two I got were the all-too-aptly named Punch the Clock and Goodbye Cruel World). Within a couple of months I had them all and a less financially secure start to my adult life. But I had the most up-to-date recordings, with pristine sound and all the B-sides and legally available demos that a boy could want.
Fast forward a couple of years, and Rhino has the rights to the Elvis Costello catalogue. Now there are double CD versions of all those albums with even better sound and more rare tracks, and they go all the way to the also aptly named All This Useless Beauty, the last time I checked. The last time I checked was a while ago because I just threw up my hands and said "You can have 'em."
It's not just the established Elvis Costellos of the world. Foo Fighters, who I do love, have also released newer versions of their albums with extra tracks. Like I say, I love the boys but not enough to go out and repurchase what I already have to get some UK-only cover versions. And yes I'm aware I can get these via torrent, but there are philosophical and practical reasons for me not wanting to do so which I'll go into sometime else if need be.
It's the same with these Beatles remasters. I have all the Beatles albums I want, and I have the Anthology collection which was pretty much billed as "Yup, that's it". There's even two versions of Let it Be that you can get depending on what your opinion of Paul McCartney is. If anything, there's a surplus of materials out there and I'm tired of being made to feel like I MUST get them for the best experience ever, even though I'm pretty certain in about ten years there will be another version. This is the source of the only joke in Men in Black that I still laugh at: Tommy Lee Jones looking at an alien audio technology and saying "Looks like I'll have to buy The White Album again."
What bothers me most is that music is just about the only industry that makes this happen. Yes, I can get new editions of the Nineteen Eighty-Four with essays and notes, but I'm never told that this was the way the book was supposed to be read. I'm never told that this is the real vision of the author, or that this paper will make the words come alive. Actually, there has been one or two incidents of this, including what pretty much amounted to a re-write of All The Kings Men, but you'll admit these are the exceptions and not the rule.
Maybe movies do this also, with director's cuts and remastered versiona. But even in those cases, like Star Wars and Blade Runner, it's become almost a joke and those directors are now being seen for what they are - charlatans who are stretching out their one great moment when their current output is trivial at best (oh yeah Ridley Scott lovers, bring it!).
If anything, the driving force behind this is not the quality of the art produced but the technology being used as the vector for it. The real reason Amazon is willing to so heavinly subsidize the network traffic for the Kindle is so that you can buy another copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that you can read anytime you want. Withe a better disk player or a fancy projection systen, you can see Blade Runner with more relasitic looking scenes and even more stilted, confusing-for-the-sake-of-being-confusing dialogue (Oh yeah, you KNOW you want some now).
So people are going to run to their stores to get the new Beatles collection, and they're more than welcome to it. I have my copy of The White Album right here on my soon-to-be-extinct iPod and I've been quite happy so far.
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