Here's Your Infinite Sadness

Apparently it wasn't enough for Billy Corgan to simply masquerade his new band as a reunited version of the Smashing Pumpkins. ("The Pumpkins are back! I mean, we don't have Iha or D'arcy, but we've got Billy and the drummer who came crawling back after Billy took the moral high ground and 'fired' him after that keyboardist OD'd!") But I digress. Here's a charming tale of how they plan to sell their "comeback" album.

Best Buy and Target each get a version with an exclusive bonus track. So does iTunes. Like, a different one for each. Everybody else gets the regular version with no bonus tracks. So if you want all of the bonus tracks, you have to buy an album at Best Buy, an album at Target, and an album at iTunes.

The oddest thing to me in looking at those four tracklists is the Best Buy version - where the bonus track isn't just tacked onto the end (which is an increasingly common iTunes stunt that I don't have a particular problem with, because you can still listen to the album in any order you choose.) The Best Buy bonus song is track 9 of 13, which just seems very odd to me in the course of actually sequencing an album to make it flow. It's completely different from tacking something on to the end of the album, and it puzzles me for reasons I can't fully articulate.

So it looks like they're putting out four different versions of the album, right? Oh if only. I did a little snooping and discovered that there will actually be twelve different versions of the album worldwide. TWELVE!

In actuality, you can put out 50 different versions for all I care. If your fans are stupid enough to swallow the nonsense of buying multiple copies of an album in each cover with each bonus track, then more power to you. And the fact is that the bonus tracks will float around online, so if people really want to hear them, they can do it. But the distribution method of screwing over independent record stores is complete bullshit. You could at least ship the different bonus track versions around, instead of going out of your way to force people to buy the album at Best Buy or Target instead of an actual record store.

It makes you wonder if Billy Corgan ever received the age old advice of "Don't shit where you eat." Dinner is served!