There are now 86 posts in the fiver from Fopp category (you can't see them all because Typepad truncates the list after the most recent 50, something they tried to justify to me in terms of page-load times). That's 1 in every 16. Actually I thought it might be a higher proportion, especially since 1 in 6 of all the albums I own were bought in 2001 or 2002.
Let's talk marketing-speak: that 'price point' was a real 'sweet spot' for me in the first half of this decade. It was just cheap enough to get me to buy loads of albums that I thought I might be quite interested in, or that I remembered from cassette copies years before, or to fill in the gaps of my collection of albums by Bob or Van or Miles. And, let's remember, a fiver for a CD &mash; including artwork, packaging and better-than-MP3 audio quality — was still cheaper than downloads from the iTunes Store.
But it couldn't last. The evidence of of gluttony was just too physical: full shelves and piles of unsorted new purchases. (No such tell-tale signs with download or streaming over-indulgence.)
And where the £5 level lowered the threshold for my 'buy' impulse, free streaming has raised it considerably. I'm probably more interested in Ferry's Dylanesque covers album than I ever was in Another Time, Another Place, but I can find out from We7 that Make You Feel My Love and If Not For You are the only really striking tracks.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that Another Time, Another Place feels pleasant but expendable in my collection. It starts well, of course, and kudos to Bryan for singing Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson, even he didn't exactly dig deep in their respective songbooks. Unlike The Bride Stripped Bare, it holds no memories for me.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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