Best in peace: Shoddy Goods 035
What happened to the greatest-hits album?
I'm Jason Toon and when I got my teenage hands on some spare cash, the first thing I did was buy music. So to make my cassette budget count, I'd start with that old reliable: an artist's best-of collection. This Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people make, buy, and sell, asks why even today's greatest hitmakers don't release greatest-hits albums.
Contrary to various prophecies of doom, digital music has not killed the album, not even close. The album is still how artists of all sizes make their artistic statements, mark their career evolution, or raise gas money to get to the next show.
What digital music has killed is the greatest-hits album, at least by current artists. The pattern had held across decades and genres: just about any act with a decent-sized discography would punctuate it with one or more greatest-hits records.
Then that just stopped. Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Adele, Bruno Mars, Harry Styles, Dua Lipa, Justin Timberlake: we're talking commercial titans with dozens of hits and, in some cases, 15- or 20-year careers at this point, but no greatest hits albums. That didn't used to happen. It's not just the platinum set, either; best-ofs by indie artists have also gotten much rarer. What's going on?
Six of the hottest albums of (checks calendar) 2025
Soulless cash grab or convenient starter kit?
The greatest-hits album's uneasy cocktail of commerce and art has long been a point of contention among fans and artists. I wrote a piece way back in 2001 defending the concept. In retrospect, the early 2000s seem to be the Golden Age of legacy greatest-hits albums. It seemed like just a matter of time before every artist with at least a few albums would get a thoughtfully compiled best-of on Rhino Records or Shout! Factory. And I loved it.
The bursting of the CD bubble brought that dream to an end. A lot has changed since then. This time around, I called on two of the smartest music writers and most passionate music lovers I know for their insights into the state of the greatest-hits album, and because nerding out about stuff like this is fun.
Annie Zaleski writes about music in The Guardian, Salon, and elsewhere, and has written a shelfload of books like the bestselling Taylor Swift: The Stories Behind the Songs. She was also my editor at the St. Louis Riverfront Times when I used to write about music. Annie's generosity and inclusivity could single-handedly destroy the stereotype of music experts as annoying snobs. The most influential best-ofs in her life include REM's Eponymous, Depeche Mode's Catching Up, the Smiths' Best 1, and Duran Duran's Decade.
The many outlets Dan Epstein has written for include Rolling Stone and SPIN (RIP). But I know him best through his ridiculously entertaining books about baseball and the '70s, and his excellent newsletter, Jagged Time Lapse. He's just co-authored Now You're One of Us, the memoir of Jeff & Steven McDonald of the great LA punk-psychedelic-power-pop legends Redd Kross. And when it comes to greatest-hits albums? "I pretty much learned to play guitar to The Who's Meaty, Beaty Big and Bouncy, The Byrds' Greatest Hits, and All Wrapped Up: The Best of The Undertones," he says.
Both of them have loved too many more best-ofs to name here - Dan even produced one for one of my favorite bands, UK glam monsters Slade - without having any illusions about the business motivations behind them for artists and labels alike.
"Traditionally, a lot of the greatest-hits records are the contract fulfillers," says Zaleski, "where a band's like, 'I've got one record left on my seven-year contract? Greatest hits!', because it's a way just to very easily fulfill that."
"Some are obviously cash grabs that were thrown together without any real understanding of the artist or feel for sequencing," Epstein says. "Many of these types of collections have been released over the years as stop-gap product to tide fans — or more to the point, the record company — over until the artist's next record comes out. And sometimes they're released as an easy way for a record company to recoup their investment after an artist leaves the label, or dies, or whatever."
But even purely mercenary motives can produce meaningful testaments to an artist's work. The infamous Allen Klein ended up hated by anyone unfortunate enough to hire him as a manager, including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He is why the CD versions of Stones albums were notoriously shoddy for so long. But then he also put together the Beatles' "red" (1962-1966) and "blue" (1967-1970) collections, which Zaleski cites as "the gold standard of thinking about greatest hits records and how to really do them right."
Even the best of the best-ofs will never win over those who think they reduce an artist's complexity to a simplified caricature. Some greatest-hits albums have become so ubiquitous and inescapable that you can see their point. Anybody who has lived in a college dorm since 1985 will know every upstroke of Bob Marley's Legend whether they like it or not.
"Marley made so many great records, but no one seemed to care," Epstein says. "For so many people I knew, Bob Marley (and reggae in general) began and ended with Legend. It eventually killed my love of just about every song on the collection; frankly, I would rather listen to an album of Bob Marley's greatest bong hits than Legend at this point.
"I also spent a weekend in Carmel, California in the early 2000s where it seemed like a law had been passed that The Very Best of the Eagles must be on constant rotation in every bar and restaurant within the town limits, which was really fucking annoying after a while."
And it's always a bummer when a best-of feels lazy. "I'm a huge Bruce Springsteen fan," Zaleski says, "but in recent years, he put out these, I think, quasi-greatest hits records that were just really like, what is the point of this? The track listings were not interesting. They weren't inspired. It seemed very tired. And it was sort of like, who is the audience for this? So it maybe just comes down to intention."
All released within 3 years of the artist's debut single. The '60s moved fast. Or at least '60s record labels did.
Olden goldies
Bad news for sufferers of Legend/Eagles fatigue: the charts are dominated by greatest-hits albums like never before… just not ones by current artists. Dan's nemeses are among the 32 best-ofs in this week's Billboard Hot 200 Albums chart. The chart for this week in 1990 only had 13. But break it down by when those artists debuted, and it's clear that the greatest-hits has become a legacy item.
All of the top-selling best-ofs in 1990 were by artists you could still describe as mid-career, while almost the reverse is true now. This week's charting best-ofs feature more than twice as many artists who debuted before 1975 than since 2000. My mind melts a little when I realize that blink-182 and Eminem are more "legacy" today than Rod Stewart and the Moody Blues were in 1990, but the numbers don't lie.
"The vinyl boom really has played into a lot of why [older] greatest hits records are continuing to sell," Zaleski says. "When teenagers are getting their first turntable, it's like, what are you going to get for them? You're going to get something classic. You're going to get something you know is good."
So yeah, the popularity of legacy best-ofs makes sense given the exalted role of physical records today. When you can listen to anything, the music you choose to buy preserved in physical form must be special, and there's no more prestigious imprimatur than the test of time. Of course, a Best of Beyoncé or Lady Gaga's Greatest Hits would sell like gangbusters on vinyl, too. But the force that did the most to drive greatest-hits albums is also the one that has lost the most power in the digital age: the major labels.
Whose oeuvre is it anyway?
The days when major labels essentially held artists in indentured servitude are over. Their manufacturing, distribution, and promotion clout simply matters less now, so artists have more leverage. And artists have gotten a lot smarter about keeping control of their creative output. That means no more labels rushing out hits packages without the artist's consent or even knowledge.
If an artist wants to bundle up some of their favorites for fans, they can do it themselves with a digital playlist and instantly reach their fans. Taylor Swift, Zaleski says, "hasn't had an official greatest-hits record, but she's been using streaming services to kind of put together little mini best-ofs or little, like, themed EPs. So I think that might be the way a lot of the greatest hits are unfolding. They're hits in a different way, in a different context."
It's also easier than ever for listeners to curate their own ever-changing version of an artist's catalog. What used to take hours with a tape deck now takes minutes. "They can choose which songs are the hits," Zaleski says. "You see artists like Pavement, for example, having a random B-side become their most popular song because it became a streaming favorite. It wasn't even a single.
"Or for example, Duran Duran has a newer song called 'Invisible' that is massively popular due to this online, viral, video-game-type thing. A lot of younger people like know the band because of that, not because of 'Hungry Like the Wolf'. So what I find really fascinating but also really charming is that the lack of a greatest-hits lets the band's catalog breathe a little bit."
So artists don't need official greatest-hits albums to get out of onerous contracts or curate their legacy. And listeners don't need them to sample new artists or to hear all the hits in a row. It sounds like the best-of as we know it is over. The pop world moves on.
"Greatest-hits albums were my gateway to so many wonderful artists," Epstein says, "or, in the case of REO Speedwagon, a welcome warning that further exploration would be fruitless — and I'm incredibly grateful for that. At the same time, I don't really mourn their passing; of the many things I mourn in relation to the current music business landscape, the decline of the best-of is pretty far down the list."
"It's a little bit sad," Zaleski says, "but I love that everyone can decide 'this is what the canon is'."
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As a kid my music budget was so low that I largely stuck to Greatest Hits, just to really be sure I wasn’t getting an album of filler after the one radio hit I heard (I still feel the sting of paying $18 for a Poison album with 2 decent songs). What were your first music albums? Still like and listen to ‘em, or is it all shame and regret now? Let’s hear about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat!
—Dave (and the rest of Meh)
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