The nice man from the phone company came this afternoon to fix the plug which connects me to the outside world, obliging me to move a CD cabinet and displace the hatbox in which arrived some holiday years back housing a Girl Group box set produced by Rhino.
Once fixed and gone, I remembered to check the mail, which brings far fewer offerings than it did a couple years back, as I fade slowly into obscurity and the music industry transitions into whatever this week’s theory is that it’s transitioning into.
But I realized something was missing.
Every year since I started getting on the lists I’m now slowly being removed from, every fall came the box sets. Lavish things, some of them. Complete compilations of some artist I’d never dreamed of caring of. So I never got Charlie Rich, which I’d still like, but I’ve got a still unopened Eagles box in the bookcase which holds the whole lot of them.
Not this year.
Now…there’s absolutely no reason anybody should send me a box set these days, and so I don’t mean to complain.
On the other hand, a recent tour of eBay suggests that the CD itself has retained far more value than I might have guessed (and if people actually pay those prices, I’d best get busy).
And it is holiday time.
So my question, to the assembled multitudes, is this: Are they still making box sets? Or is that one of the first casualties of the digital age?
And if they’ve stopped making them, do you miss them?
Me, I liked the packaging, but I never have listened to all ten discs of Hank Williams, nor, in truth, even to the whole Chuck Berry set I was kindly given by a woman at MCA more than a decade back. But it sits on the shelf, still, and when I needed to look up his version of “Hellbound Train,” there ’twas. Which is why I keep them. That, and the packaging.
Consider this an open thread, should anybody wish to talk about their favorite sets, or the irreplaceable ones. Or not.
