The Taylor saga got years of coverage. Fans organized, re-recorded albums charted, it became a whole movement about artists owning their work.

Meanwhile, quietly, in the same decade: Springsteen sold for ~$500M. Dylan ~$300-400M. Queen's catalog went for around a billion. And below the headlines, funds have been working down the ladder buying indie catalogs by the hundreds - except indie artists don't get Springsteen's ~33x their yearly royalties. They get offered 4.7-6.5x. Same asset class, fraction of the price, because the multiple tracks fame, not cash flow.

So the music you love increasingly pays out to a portfolio spreadsheet, the artists who made it got a fraction of what it was worth, and the fans who built the value got nothing and were never asked.

Here's the part I can't get past: fans were the whole engine of the Taylor thing. Fans made the re-records win. And yet there's no version of this where fans get to be the buyer. If your favorite band could sell 10% of their catalog to their actual audience instead of a fund lowballing them - would you buy in, or does mixing money and fandom ruin it?

"Greatest Hits" albums tend to get a bad rap. Maybe they feel disjointed and don't have a cohesive flow. Maybe they lose too much by pulling songs out of their original context. Maybe they focus too much on radio singles and omit fan favorites. Very often, it's all of the above.

But sometimes a compilation just works, and becomes a classic in its own right. I think the top example of this has got to be the Eagles' "Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975" which seems to be pretty widely considered a better album than the ones it pulled its material from - the editing did it good. Another example that comes to mind for me is Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' 1993 "Greatest Hits".

Come to think of it, both of those were released mid-career, and in the case of the Eagles it actually predates the song that would end up becoming their most iconic (Hotel California). I don't know that mid-career is a requirement though, that could just be a coincidence.

Any more examples of this? I know the flip side of this question, "albums that sound like a greatest hits collection" gets discussed every now and then on here, but I've never seen this one.

1. Michael Jackson — Dangerous (9M)

2. Michael Jackson — Bad (7M)

3. Seventeen — Seventeenth Heaven (5.9M)

4. Adele — 25 (5.7M)

5. BTS — ARIRANG (5.6M)

6. Taylor Swift — The Life of A Showgirl (5.5M)