The latest sport in ABBA fandom seems to be bitching about this release. Even worse than the usual bitching every time a new compilation or reissue is released.

It's happening everywhere. Even some of us here have joined in, saying they "don't see the point if it" and all the usual comments. As if it's some personal insult that Universal Music has released this DVD.

It makes perfect sense to me. Just as there will always be a market for a single disc of ABBA's biggest hits, ditto there will be a market for a DVD with those same big hits. Not everyone *wants* The Definitive Collection with all the songs. All they're really after is Dancing Queen and Waterloo and Mamma Mia and a few others.

I know that I've experienced the same thing - there's lots of artists that I would like to get their greatest hits CD to get the few songs that I know or like, and I don't want to sit through umpteen songs that I don't know or care about. Yes, I know in the CD age we can program out the songs we don't want to hear, but that's not the point. And sometimes those other songs can grow on the listener and inspire one to seek out more music beyond the greatest hits. But not always.

Obviously Universal also sees that there is a market for ABBA GOLD on DVD - otherwise they wouldn't have gone to the trouble to release it.

"The fans" are only a tiny proportion of the market. After all, there's only 300 or so people in the world hardcore enough to bother joining the mailing lists, only 500-600 people attend the ABBF day every year, and even though there's 28,000 people registered on the official site, there's just a small percentage that actually participate in The Forum there - and quite a lot of them aren't really that hard core (they don't even have all the albums, or "essentials" like Bright Lights, Dark Shadows). Not many people out of 6 billion. If we were the only people that bought any ABBA release, they certainly wouldn't have sold more than 25 million copies of ABBA GOLD in the last decade, no matter how many re-releases and updated versions there are.

Releasing ABBA GOLD on DVD now isn't going to stop the release of something "new" in the future. The irony is that if ABBA GOLD, or The Definitive Collection, or anything else doesn't sell, it's less likely that anything new will be released (including ABBA In Concert, ABBA The Movie or especially anything "from the vault"). So if we're going to boycott these releases, or bitch about them so much that potential buyers are put off, we'll be less likely to see anything "new" in the future.

Buy it, don't buy it because you've already got everything that's on it and you're happy with what you've got. That's your choice. But why bitch and moan and go on and on and on about it? It won't stop it being released, and besides, we've heard every single complaint about re-releases ad nauseum. It's old, it's tired. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt

And it could be worse. We could still be in the 80s, when ABBA were pariahs and the only things released were those crappy, badly thought out budget compilations that no one bought.

Ian Cole aka "Ask Ian"