Music Box Sets
In the case of music, contemporary box sets are usually made up of four or more discs boxes, covering a broad range of boxes of the music of a given artist or genre. Artists and bands with an extremely long and successful career often have anthology or "essential" collections of their boxes of music released as box sets. These often include rare and never-before-released tracks. Some box sets collect together previously released boxes of singles or albums by a music artist, and often collect the complete discography of an artist such as Pink Floyd's Oh, by the Way. The box set The Aeroplane Flies High, released in 1996 by The Smashing Pumpkins, is an expanded collection of the singles from their album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.
Other music box sets focus on a compilation of boxes of different artists from a particular genre such as Big Band jazz, 1960s rock and roll, or opera. They generally feature a large collection of various hits from some of the top artists of a particular genre. The scope of such box sets varies widely, with some genre-specific box sets (such as one featuring rock music) focusing on bixes of a specific style (for instance, guitar rock or "Summer of Love" music). Two of the best known companies for making box sets are Legacy Recordings and Rhino Records; both have won multiple Grammy Awards. Prior to Rhino and Legacy, companies such as Time-Life Records and Readers Digest also issued box sets.
In rare cases, box sets contain all original material such as In Search of The, a 13-disc set by Buckethead or the Merzbox, a 50-disc set by Merzbow in which 20 of the discs are of new material while the other 30 discs are catalog material. Some box sets become best sellers, such as Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin (1990), George Strait's Strait Out of the Box (1995), Nirvana's With the Lights Out (2004) and The Beatles' twin The Beatles Stereo Box Set and The Beatles in Mono discography box sets (2009).
In classical music, box sets often contain e.g. all works of a certain composer or all works in a certain genre, like symphonies or chamber music, performed by a certain orchestra, ensemble or conductor.
Read more about this topic: Box Set, Types of Box Sets
Famous quotes containing the words music, box and/or sets:
“As if, as if, as if the disparate halves
Of things were waiting in a betrothal known
To none, awaiting espousal to the sound
Of right joining, a music of ideas, the burning
And breeding and bearing birth of harmony,
The final relation, the marriage of the rest.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“It all ended with the circuslike whump of a monstrous box on the ear with which I knocked down the traitress who rolled up in a ball where she had collapsed, her eyes glistening at me through her spread fingers—all in all quite flattered, I think. Automatically, I searched for something to throw at her, saw the china sugar bowl I had given her for Easter, took the thing under my arm and went out, slamming the door.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“There is a small steam engine in his brain which not only sets the cerebral mass in motion, but keeps the owner in hot water.”
—Unknown. New York Weekly Mirror (July 5, 1845)