For as long as I can remember, the music business has been in the habit of releasing different versions of albums in different countries. Back in the 1960s, British LPs were typically longer than those issued in the USA, so American customers got hacked and butchered versions of British albums, and British customers got US releases padded out with filler. Later on the practice was used to discourage import buying: the US distributor of a British artist would try to discourage American fans from ordering from the UK by making sure that the US version had a couple of extra tracks. This was frustrating to hard-core “completist” fans: do you wait, buy both versions, or what?
Last year Saint Etienne released an excellent CD in the UK, “Tales from Turnpike House”. 12 tracks, plus a bonus CD of children’s songs. Now their US label has released the album with 4 extra tracks, 1 deleted, different sequencing, and no bonus material. But today this presents no real problem. I’ve just downloaded the extra tracks from iTunes*, and assembled a playlist with all 15 tracks in the US sequencing.
Of course this scheme could have been foiled if one of the four new tracks had been tagged “Album only” (i.e. not available on its own). So who makes that call – Apple or the distributor?
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* The only gotcha was that I had to change the album title for the four new tracks, to prevent iTunes from merging them into the UK album – I want to be able to access the original version unchanged.