Some earth-shatteringly insightful revelations regarding the nature and function of "Greatest Hits" LPs!

By Nekesa Mumbi Moody (AP) - Collective Soul's Dean Roland, whose band put out a greatest-hits LP in 2001: "The short answer to the whole thing is it comes out to the money issue. The labels can put out a greatest-hits album and it's going to sell."

Sheryl Crow, whose The Very Best Of Sheryl Crow was a multiplatinum hit in 2003, agrees profits weigh heavily: "Part of that is record labels continually try to work their catalogue so they always have money coming in."

But Kevin Gore, executive vice-president of sales and marketing at Rhino Entertainment, which puts out various greatest-hits packages, compilations and boxed sets says a "Best Of Sugar Ray" - which they recently released - is valid.

"At the end of the day, there's a larger audience that will buy a greatest-hits collection...Let's say there are two hit songs on a record from five years ago, and then there are another two hit songs from a record from three years ago," he said. "You have a greater opportunity to bring in a larger audience because you're putting all the hits in one place."

A more critical issue, record companies say, is the decreasing shelf space to carry an artist's catalogue. "If an artist has five or six or seven albums in his or her catalogue, a lot of times many retailers are only carrying two or three. Perhaps songs that were included on albums one, three and five night no longer get the kind of visibility or shelf space that a hits record will provide those particular songs," said Jeff Jones, executive vice-president of Sony BMG's catalogue division Legacy Recordings (whose catalogue releases this year range from Miles Davis to Bob Dylan to...Martika).

Which brings us to the recent Toy Soldiers: The Best Of Martika, the title cut of which was her lone hit single, in 1989. It enjoyed a resurgence after Eminem sampled it on his song "Little Toy Soldiers." Fans searching for the original song may have been out of luck, Jones said. Stores weren't carrying her records anymore, he added. "So without creating a new hits collection, there's no visibility."