Idolator Asks: Who Watches Bonus DVDs Attached To Albums, Anyway?

Michaelangelo Matos | March 13, 2008 2:00 am
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So Blu-Ray has won out over HD-DVD in the future-of-how-we-rent-movies-for-home-viewing technology sweepstakes. Since I have no horse in this race whatsoever–I’m still behind watching all the movies I DV-R’ed from TCM’s month of Oscar-winners–I mention it only as the pretext to an Idolator poll. Not the critical kind–the kind where you, the reader, answers a broad, sweeping question that’s been nagging me for the past few, well, years: Who, precisely, watches the bonus DVDs so many current pop albums come with?

You know the kind of thing I’m talking about. Sometimes a reissue gets one of these as part of the package, like the catalog remasters Rhino/Warner Bros. did in 2005 for R.E.M. (I did in fact watch a couple of those; For Fans Only, meaning bigger ones than me, and I kind of doubt even the most fervent R.E.M. lovers were that impressed by them.) In recent cases by Queens of the Stone Age and the Go-Betweens (in what turned out, sadly, to be their last official release), the DVDs were of live performances also captured on the accompanying CDs, and while that’s nice for completists I found myself in both cases drawn more toward the audio-only portion of the package. As far as new(ly released) albums, well, what can it mean that the first recent CD to pop up when I Googled “albums bonus dvd” was the friggin’ Jethro Tull Christmas Album? Surely those of you not down in Austin getting wasted in the afternoon sun while losing 12.6 percent of your hearing to bands you won’t remember by blog-time tonight can help a brother out?

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