Squeezing LP's Onto CD's
From: Ice Magazine (March 98 issue) via Aaron
Polygram Chronicles overhauled the KISS catalog late last summer, and a couple of Ice readers wrote in with beefs about the packaging. Richard Woolington of Indy, IN. points out, "Gene Simmons himself long proclaimed that the new remasters would include 'all the goodies' formerly included in the original records. The art would be premium quality and they weren't sure how, but the 'goodies' would be included" Woolington then ran through a few differences between the original LP graphics and what was reproduced for the CD's, such as, "The cardboard gun in Love Gun was just printed on the sleeve like an afterthought."

And Woflgang Pesch e-mailed us, "Kiss Alive and Kiss Alive II were both reissued on double CD's, when both releases would have fit on single CD's. What ws Mercury thinking?"

Again we turned to the head of Polygram's catalog division, Bill Levenson. "We worked as many elements into the packaging as was economically feasible," Levenson explains to Ice. "These records stayed at mid-price, and working within the constraints of a good bargain, we brought as many elements to the package as we could. On Kiss Alive II, we did integrate the tattoo sheet into it; when it came to Love Gun, we tried out different ways to do it, but when you're working with a 5X5 inch format, a lot of things that work on LP don't necessarily work on the CD size.

"We did the posters where we could; I believe there are six packages that have fold-out posters. We even broke the mold on Double Platinum and did an embossed foil digipak. In most cases we did it where we could, but there were a few elements that were really hard to work into the CD's. And we did have a goal to not raise the price. I think we gave a lot of value for mid-pricing.

As for Alive & Alive II being issued as double CD's, it turns out that Alive would not have fit comfortably on one disc because it times out as 78:27. As discussed in these pages many times before, althought technically a CD can hold 80 minutes, record labels are often loathe to surpass 78, 76 or even 74 minutes because older players often have trouble playing them.

To put Alive out as a double CD and Alive II as a single CD "would have created a pricing differential," Levenson says. "One would have been a full-priced single disc, as oppossed to a mid-priced double disc. And because of packaging costs - the way we did the booklets - we really needed the 2X pricing. It wasn't about timing; it was about business aspects. Doing them both as doubles gave us a little financial room to work with the special packaging." Consumers may recall that Apple records faced the same dilemma, and opted to do the same thing, with The Beatles' "red and blue" greatest hits albums.