The Four Seasons C/D?

This is way too much for my tastes (one good CD compilation is enough for me), but for diehards, this will likely be impossible to top:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SOEIQo9QwI

Good lord. Who the hell is gonna buy that? Ten guys on the Hoffman forum?

Libraries, friends and family? 2,500 doesn't seem like a huge press run for worldwide distribution.

You forgot the #onethread when you mentioned libraries

they should have called it Four Seasons - Total Soundscaping or Four Seasons - Total Bandscaping or something tho

I clicked on the video all like "c'mon guys there's a 10CD Manfred Mann box, why would you think a big Four Seasons box is off limits"...and then I saw the actual specifications.

Holy shit lol.

I mean, their key demographic isn't getting any younger, and the number of people who became serious hard-core Fourheads from seeing Jersey Boys couldn't be more than 100-150. Figure 25-30% of the audience for the show bought the Broadway cast recording, maybe 20% of that number bought a Four Seasons CD compilation, 10% of that number bought The Kaleidoscope Good-Time Machine Post-Dispatch or whatever the fuck that's called, and maybe 5% of that number knows someone who might be interested in this box.

I'm interested in it... I'm not going to buy it though.

I am the target market for this, hard to overstate just how much the music here means to me, but if I spend five hundred dollars on a box set I don't think I can even say "my wife would be mad at me," I would be mad at me if I dropped 500 bones on this.

J Edgar, if you really, REALLY are that tempted, I would suggest buying two - one to keep and one to sell after the market price goes through the roof when it inevitably goes out of print. This happened with Bob Dylan's Cutting Edge super deluxe set, which was 18 CD's and retailed for $700. Seemed ridiculously expensive at the time, but in the six years it's been out-of-print, near mint copies regularly fetch at least $1400. I just downloaded a copy, but I certainly covet the real thing. In retrospect, I would have bought two copies had I known I could sell one to cover the cost of both. (It took a while for the set to sell out - IIRC they still had a lot for sale after they began shipping, so I didn't think it would become that valuable.)

I only spent $500 on a boxed set twice ever in my life (a few years ago, when my savings were triple what they are now, lolz). one of them was the Judas Priest box, the high sticker price wasn't really due to the amount of music as much as the extras, like autographed photos of Rob Halford (not robo-signed, the real deal). the other was an Anthrax box which netted me a gold record with my name on it so now I can lie and tell people I played on Among the Living.

I fucking love The Four Seasons, literally everything about their music brings me joy, idk if I could EVER listen to this much of them though, unless the price tag came with Frankie showing up at my house and singing five songs.

honestly though if there were thirteen cds of them rehearsing the songs I would listen to the shit out of that. hearing vocal groups rehearse is sometimes more fun than hearing the finished product

Would it be "cheating" to skip straight to Genuine Imitation Life Gazette when I've only familiar with (and not especially fond of) a handful of their hits?

The group themselves probably thought of those early LPs as filler/something to get through while the singles were the real thing, I can't see any level of reverence for the group that would make someone insist you listen to them first.

OK, but would I be losing a lot of context without listening to a greatest hits first?

Hmmm, I think if you've heard a handful and didn't like them I dunno if there's anything on a greatest hits that would give you anything more, though I may be forgetting something. Can always go back to it after you've exhausted the Genuine Imitation album anyway.