Various Artists - Mainstage 2008 (Album)
I’m somewhat confused by the compilation album concept. Why do they still exist? Who is buying them? WHY?? In this day and age of iTunes saturation, where it’s becoming more about the song than the album, where you can download single tracks and create your own playlists, why oh why do the major labels insist on compiling songs under vague, trite and often grasping-at-straws concepts?
Mainstage 2008 is a Warner-released, thinly veiled attempt to cash in on the live scene of 2008. Even that is vague. The bands featured have toured in festivals dating back to January (Kings of Leon played at the Falls Festival), through to July (The Wombats featured at Splendour In The Grass), and the only thing they have in common is that all featured artists have played in Australia in 2008. Woo. Why not compile an album of all bands who have hair? Or wear t-shirts?
The tracks, none of which are live, are all the stock-standard singles that we’ve heard on the radio for the last six to twelve months. There’s nothing new here. Granted, it might expose some people to some of your more obscure acts (Band of Horses’ No One’s Gonna Love You is beautiful, and would never see the light of commercial-radio day; Feist’s My Moon, My Man might offer something new to everyone who downloaded 1, 2, 3, 4), but if there’s anyone living in Australia who hasn’t heard Gyroscope’s Snakeskin or Faker’s This Heart Attack they’re either deaf or in a coma. Need I also point out that seven of the tracks on this album (Faker and Gyroscope, plus The Wombats’ Let’s Dance To Joy Division, Angus & Julia Stone’s The Beast, British India’s Tie Up My Hands, Midnight Juggernauts’ Into The Galaxy and Modest Mouse’s Dashboard) all featured in Triple J’s Hottest 100 for 2007, and all but Angus & Julia Stone appeared on THAT compilation album, released back in March. So it’s not really jam packed with fresh 2008 sounds, is it?
As far as the compilation concept goes, this one’s scraping the bottom of the barrel, and as cynical as I may sound, I can’t help but think Warner might not have anything but bottom line profit in mind. To be fair, all the tracks are great, but that’s why most of them have already been released as singles, and to be honest, there’s not much here you probably don’t already have, whether it’s from yet another compilation or the albums themselves.
For those less cynical, it’s a great mix of music that might revamp memories from some of the year’s big festivals. It could also offer a great boost to your MP3 player of choice, for new, wonderful playlists you could create, and it might open the door to a band you might have missed out on. Then again, if you missed out on increasingly hard to get tickets it could just rub in what you might have missed out on, which is yet another nail in this dusty coffin.
I think the days of compilation albums being truly relevant ended around the time of The Best of 100% Hits 1993. The sampler, distributed freely, featuring new and upcoming artists remains essential to getting music out there. But paying for what you already have, bundled up in a new, non-biodegradable case, seems increasingly pointless and very much behind the times, and is another sad example of the majors trying desperately to remain relevant and keep their stranglehold. Reinvention, rather than repackaging, is what they should be aiming for, and the time wasted on clearing compilation tracks could be spent more fruitfully on listening to what the people really want, and understanding how much the industry really has changed.
Buy this if you like giving rich companies money. Otherwise, spend your $20 on actually getting out there and seeing the bands live – something this album, ironically, does not encourage.
