DON’T LOOK BACK: For casual fans as...

DON’T LOOK BACK: For casual fans as well as Serious Dylan Watchers, “The Bootleg Series” is both an aural delight and an important historical document. But more importantly, it symbolizes the enormous impact of the compact disc revolution, which has transformed the way pop music views--and commercially exploits--its history.

As recently as five years ago, most record company vaults were tightly shut. Labels feared that making available old, potentially inferior material would distract fans from an artist’s current work.

How times have changed. Record labels now realize that older--and more affluent--pop fans, armed with new CD equipment, will pay top dollar to expand their record collections with well-packaged hits packages and archivist collections. They’ll even buy records that were flops--Warners recently put out a collection, “Devo’s Greatest Misses,” of Devo songs that weren’t hits.

Just look at CD authority Pete Howard’s monthly newsletter, International CD Exchange (ICE), which broke the Dylan bootleg story. Howard’s current issue lists more than 80 CD reissues for the month of March alone, including hits packages (or histories) of the Blasters, the Mamas & the Papas, Jimmy Somerville, Johnny Rivers, the Isley Brothers, Sparks, Billie Holiday, Rick Nelson, the Beach Boys and (!) Chris Montez.

“The CD craze has been a cash cow for the record industry because people are buying CDs for $15 that are essentially duplicates of what they already owned on vinyl,” explains Howard. “The higher list price of CDs has made it far more economically viable to go through the vaults and repackage rock historical documents.”

According to Howard, top-selling boxed sets, featuring artists ranging from Frank Sinatra to Led Zeppelin, have sold anywhere from 250,000 to 350,000 copies, often at $40 or $50 apiece, a price that has generated considerable profits.

“But ‘The Bootleg Series’ is going to cause a sensation,” Howard says. “It’s unprecedented to have an entire box of unreleased material. If it does well, it could inspire similar projects from Bruce Springsteen, who has some great outtakes in the can, or Paul McCartney, who could give permission to compile a similar Beatles rarity project.”