Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[dbone828]

I noticed that the running times for the Beatles' Anthology 1 discs were a bit shorter than that of the Anthology 3 CDs, so I was curious to see if you could gather all six discs worth of the Beatles Anthology onto five discs...Here's what I noticed:

I figured that since I would be bunching them together to save time, it wouldn't make sense to keep "Real Love" in between "Kansas City/Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey" from the end of Anthology 1 and "Yes It Is," which followed it on Anthology 2. So, I moved the two reunion singles to very end of the set, making everything chronological.

When I did that, I found that, yes, you could fit all of the Anthology tracks into 5 CD's, and strangely enough, each disc covers a specific time frame:

Disc 1 - 1958 - 1963 (77:26)
Disc 2 - 1964 - 1965 (78:58)
Disc 3 - 1966 - 1967 (79:31)
Disc 4 - 1968 (79:44)
Disc 5 - 1969 - 1995 (79:34)

It seems strange that there was no overlap in years. And If I would have added one extra song to any of the discs, the running time would have gone over 80 minutes.

Kinda makes me wonder if they were originally planning on releasing the set this way, divided by specific time frames, rather than just three volumes.

[Joost]

That's interesting... I suppose you could be right.

[peterbell1]

Excellent detective work!
I have never read anywhere that it was meant to be a 5CD set rather than three sets of double CDs, but it does make sense. Those timings and the year-by-year organisation seem too much to be just a coincidence.

Maybe a 5CD box set was planned then they decided to stagger the releases so that the albums could be used to help market the two Threetles singles. So "Free as a Bird" was added to the first set and "Real Love" added to the second, messing up the chronological order and forcing the set to be split over six discs.

That strategy obviously worked for them though. According to Wikipedia ...... "450,000 copies of Anthology 1 were sold in its first day of release, the most sales for an album in a single day ever."

Having a 5CD box set of outtakes would have definitely limited the appeal for buyers - a casual fan might fork out for a 2CD set but would be unlikely to pay for a full 5CD box set.