Quick Poll Results On Hitstory Release

Ok...where is Joan Deary when we need her? At least her repackaging looked nice and always gave us some unreleased goodies.

I voted "No", the reason being that this release appears to me to be yet another attempt to get the fans to buy the same product again and again. If the intention is to woo new fans to the fold, then this fails on a number of counts. I really am staggered by BMG's lack of creativity with this one, in fact I am grossly offended by it. The big-wigs at BMG have spent years telling us how those nasty people at RCA abused Elvis' body of work with overly exploitative releases when he was alive, and here they are doing exactly the same thing. Another point which really irritates the hell out of me is their insistance on using photographs of Elvis from the fifties on every damn release - every non-fan I know prefers 70s Elvis. This pre-concieved notion that the public only like the fifties image of Elvis is proof of how out of touch and short sighted everyone in the Elvis industry actually is. So in the eyes of the public this set confirms the myth that Elvis was a relic of the fifties whose catalogue of work consists of the same 30 hits on 5000 different albums. Whilst I'll concede that disc 3 does contain some slightly more obscure recordings, this is simply too little too late. The time to expose the public to Elvis' lesser known (and, in my view, far superior) tracks would have been when he was dominating the world charts with two songs which the public had never heard before, and the resulting album(s) which should have contained many obscure (In the public's mind) recordings, actually contained the same old tat in a shiny new cover. ANY Elvis album would have sold around 10 million copies on the strength of ALLC, so why didn't BMG take this opportunity to broaden Elvis' appeal by not pumping out tracks which most of the public are sick to death of hearing anyway. That said, some of the choices on the 3rd disc are, in their own right, an enigma all their own. In short: This set offers nothing new to the fans, and even less to the general public. It's as if Col Parker never went away.

I voted yes, since the success of such releases shows that they keep Elvis in the spotlight. Nobody is forcing fans to keep the same stuff over and over again. These releases are not for the fans, but mainstream.