Mid-Life Crisis Songs #125: HOW MUCH!?!

Over the past few months, I've been getting increasingly excited about the prospect of a box set of new, previously unreleased Bruce Springsteen albums being made available for the first time. Tracks II is the long-awaited sequel to the Tracks boxset which was released back in 1998. That set contained 4 discs, and much of that unreleased material was as good as the stuff which made it onto the albums released between the early 70s and early 80s. I wasn't expecting the Tracks II material to be of an equivalent standard, covering the period between the mid-80s to the late 90s, something of a fallow period for the Boss once Tunnel Of Love was out of the way. Still, for a fan like me, I was sure there'd be lots to enjoy...

Until I saw the price.

I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure the original Tracks boxset retailed between £20 and 30 when it came out. A bargain for four discs of prime era Bruce out-takes. And OK, this new set is seven discs rather than four, add in 30 years of inflation (even though the average price of a regular CD has hardly changed in that time) and I figured the new collection might cost me about fifty quid. Which I would have been more than willing to fork out.

So how much is Tracks II?

£229.99.

Two hundred and thirty pounds.

TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY FLIPPING QUID!!!

Bruce Springsteen - Pay Me My Money Down

That's approximately £33 a disc. For albums that weren't deemed worthy of release at the time of recording.

The last proper Springsteen album, 2020's Letter To You*, cost £11.99 on release. Even if Sony wanted to charge me the equivalent of that, times seven, it'd still come in at well under a hundred quid.

(*I don't count that duff album of karaoke soul covers.)

I'm sorry, but £230 is a ridiculous amount of money. There's no justification for it beyond greed. I'm trying not to lay that at Bruce's door, since clearly he has a contract with Sony and they want to milk it for all its worth in this world of musical diminishing returns. And I guess they also want to rake back as much as they can after reportedly paying him $500 million to buy his entire catalogue, including master recordings and publishing rights, back in 2021. With that in mind, I doubt Bruce has any say in either the release of this material or its price point... but this does come in the same year his concert ticket prices crashed comfortably through the £100 barrier, and I reckon he's probably helping the rest of the E Street Band fill their pension pots at this point.

Bruce Springsteen - Easy Money

The long and the short of it then, is that I won't be buying Tracks II. Neither will I be buying the £12.99 single disc highlights CD. I'm not even sure I can be bothered to listen to it online at this point. The whole thing has just left me with a nasty taste in my mouth. I might get over that. Or I might win the lottery, and suddenly money will be no object. But like so much entertainment marketed at aging fans these days, it seems prohibitively priced for anyone but the overprivileged. Such is the world we live in...

You make up your mind, you choose the chance you take

You ride to where the highway ends and the desert breaks

Out on to an open road, you ride until the day

You learn to sleep at night with the price you pay

Oh, the price you pay, oh, the price you pay

Now you can't walk away from the price you pay