I’ve collected vinyl records for over a decade, and I’ve heard all the arguments against them, most of which are fair and correct. Yes, vinyl is inconvenient, expensive and takes up a ton of space. And, if you buy the kind of records I buy — crappy one-dollar-bin records — they also have the added benefit of being scratched up and caked with 30 years worth of dust. 

If you’ve collected records long enough, you become annoying and pretentious about music — an unintentional, but unavoidable fate. You even begin using terms like “structural integrity,” “authenticity” and “purity.” 

Albums are more interesting when listened to as the original release, without the changes and additions following its drop. Records are forever preserved in this form. They exist just as they were created. Finding a record in its original form on a streaming service today feels difficult, as if artists no longer feel the original album will satisfy their fans. 

If you look at recent discographies of some of the world’s most famous pop stars, such as Gracie Abrams, Sabrina Carpenter and Ariana Grande, they all have deluxe editions of their most recent projects — fit with remixes, bonus tracks and more.

I’m not oblivious — deluxe albums contribute towards sales numbers of the original LP,  making these extended albums effective marketing strategies. Strategies that should be overtly obvious to the consumer but instead fly under the radar and masquerade as bonus music, or — ugh — “content.” 

Artists are human, and they too live in a culture where the most appealing term currently is “more.” More money, more content and thus more music. But that inevitably begs the question whether or not these deluxe albums actually serve any artistic merit to the original record, or if they’re just adding to the already overwhelming noise. 

Sometimes it’s a question of why artists choose not to release an entirely separate album altogether instead of tacking them on as a deluxe addition. 

Take, for example, SZA’s “SOS,” a 23-track long record that was critically acclaimed after its release in 2022. The deluxe version of that album followed in 2024, adding on an entire new “disc” of 19 songs, which were then followed by the original “SOS” record from two years before.

Listening to both back-to-back does not heighten the experience of either. In fact, because you can tell through their sound how SZA’s music developed in that two-year period between “SOS” and the deluxe release, the discs clash when listened to as a cohesive unit. The styles aren’t the same. The experience is far better when imagining “SOS Deluxe: LANA” as a separate work.

Superfans of these artists will tell me the antithesis to my argument is I don’t know what I’m talking about, that these songs and fluffed-up records are more than a chart boost. Which could be the case! I am no internationally famous pop star or even a remotely obscure basement-popular musician. 

Perhaps these artists release their albums and subsequent deluxe albums and deluxe remix albums in stages because those stages have a deeper meaning unbeknownst to me. But we’ve been entrenched in a music era that prioritizes streams over quality more often than we might like to admit. So don’t blame me for not holding my breath. 

Call me boring or a purist, but it would be refreshing to see a major, international pop star release a single album without any extra tracks or remixes. At least some people used to live by the saying “less is more” — I don’t know when or why we let them go out of style.