Usually I resist buying Big Box Sets. I never did much with my 9-CD box of Stax music, for instance. The Mar-Keys are good but rarely my first choice in the morning. Otis Redding I already knew.
But surely nominal values should not matter (…tell that to those guys are arguing whether Pluto should be a "planet," a "pluton," or a mid-sized boulder.) Why is buying a Big Box Set different from buying a bunch of individual CDs over time?
There is a neuroeconomics critique of Big Box Sets. So much of the pleasure of a purchase lies in the anticipation of the buy rather than the having. The anticipatory pleasure of a Big Box Set, no matter how large, is not so much greater than the anticipatory pleasure from a single CD. Yet once you own a large box it sits around. You can’t listen to the CDs all at once. They start to feel "stale," and then you go out and want that anticipatory fix again. Bryan Caplan aside, the anticipatory pleasure of "listening to the seventh CD in the box" is somehow not the same. So you buy some more CDs. The Big Box Set sits dormant.
If it is a really big box, you can’t even look forward to the pleasure of "finishing it off," and consigning it to the basement where probably it belongs.
I have just bought Miles Davis’s 20-CD box "Live at Montreaux", used I might add. These CDs override all of the strictures against Big Box Sets.
This is fortunate because in my future lies the eight-CD Miles Davis Live at the Plugged Nickel and the 6-CD Miles Davis and Gil Evans.
The Music of Islam is another worthwhile 20-CD set. And I would like to buy a 20-CD box of Fela Kuti, if they put one out.
Here is my previous post How Quickly Should I Go Through My Stock of Battlestar Galactica?
Readers might find the lyrics to the Barenaked Ladies song “Box Set” an intriguing comparison-and-contrast to this post.
The Complete Plugged Nickel is my favorite live music recording of all-time. Six of the cds are currently in my car cd-changer. I’ve never heard more creative solos from Wayne Shorter and the rhythm section of Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams totally in sync with eatch other and Miles and Wayne.
The set of Jelly Roll Morton playing, singing, and talking to Alan Lomax is a part of American history that you yanks really all ought to own.
I’m right there with GGB about the “Live at
the Plugged Nickel” sets. I bought the LPs
originally on vinyl, then the CDs. So I
haven’t (and won’t, I think) buy the Big Box,
but we’ll see. The group was as inventive
and exciting during those sets as ever.
Hee, hee — I got the “Plugged Nickel” box set when for some odd reason Amazon was selling it for about $10, some years back. Error got corrected in about two hours — just after I’d called all my friends.
ahhhhhh!
i was just about to buy the Talking Heads Brick as reward for finishing my phd. now……
“Live! with Ginger Baker” is a very good Fela Kuti album.
I that for a lot of people buying the box set can be a status thing
mainly just to say that, “this is something that I own”. I have friends
who cluter their rooms and houses with box sets of not just CD’s but
movies, and book collections just because they are aesthetically pleasing.
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