Music used to be all about hits, and before that, artists, and before that, publishing. Recycling music was written into the process from the beginning, but when the LP came along, recycling became a way of life. To be fair, early reissue albums were not reissues at all but were what they termed “budget” discs, a term also applied to albums of “generic” music by artists of little known or unknown cachet. Labels such as Harmony and Pickwick and Design once filled drug store racks with albums of dubious distinction, filled with either deep tracks of a popular artist or tracks by bands put together in the studio to recreate hits of the day.
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 