Greatest Hits: Limited Edition, Vol. 1-3

by Thom Jurek Part of the problem with being a fan of an artist like Tim McGraw is knowing the limits of your own support for her or his work and career. On the surface, this seems like a moot point, for most of us the answer is, immediately, "total." Fair enough. But what happens when a record company goes too far, taking advantage of your loyalty in the extreme as Curb does here, by issuing the same songs over and over in different packages without anything new in the mix to entice you. Does this give you pause and debate how much you are willing to collect/purchase with your hard-earned, ever shrinking dollar? It's tough to blame the artist, who sees so little from the actual purchase of a CD that it makes little to no difference in the bottom line. Record companies worry about piracy -- also a fair point, but they make less and less effort to get fans new product or at least use their creative department's imagination to create something worth owning. This three-volume Greatest Hits collection by McGraw is a case in point. Sure, every cut by one of contemporary country's longest lasting and consistently best-selling artists is on this package. But they've already issued all three of these recordings individually, and volumes one and two were already in a double pack! The "redesign" places all three CDs in digipacks and pops them into a slipcase. That's it; and there isn't even a price break. This is nothing but marketing at its worst. While it's true that the hardest core McGraw fan will want this anyway -- you are the person this was created for -- the rest of us don't have to bother with this at all. The star rating is for the music. The package is a D-plus.