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Last year marked the revival of Guns N'Roses, the swaggering 1980s hard rock band that lost its cool overnight in 1992 when Nirvana redefined the genre.
However, it was not a new creative attempt from the band that landed it a spot in the top 20 best-selling albums of last year in the UK and the top 40 in the US.
Instead, it was Universal Music's initiative to compile a greatest hits album and market it with the same gusto that it devotes to selling the latest releases by new and current artists.
A year-long television advertising campaign in the US, giving the band the same exposure a more modern one would receive, helped rekindle the fire in old fans and introduce the group to new ones.
Despite the expense of such a large-scale campaign, re-selling Guns N' Roses' classics such as "Welcome to the Jungle" and "Sweet Child o' Mine" was a better bet for the world's largest record company than the production and marketing of a new artist or album. (Universal's Geffen label has invested $13m in the production of a Guns N' Roses release in the works for seven years that has still not materialised).
This year, Universal Music is hoping for success with greatest hits releases from Guns N' Roses' contemporaries such as Motley Crue and Def Leppard.
Reissuing and reconfiguring back catalogue material has become a significant business for record companies, sometimes accounting for more than 10 per cent of a company's music sales.
It can involve releasing elaborately packaged re-masters of old albums with better sound quality than the original, sometimes including an extra disc of unreleased tracks or a DVD; issuing an artist's "greatest hits" or unreleased concert albums; releasing box sets that survey an artist's music or genre and compilations of past songs or concerts of various artists.
What is especially attractive about the approach, especially for an industry that has suffered a 20 per cent fall in global revenues over the past four to five years, is its typically higher margins and lower risks.
Bruce Resnikoff, president of Universal Music Enterprises, the division of the record company dedicated to reviving catalogue, says: "You have the benefit of hindsight -- you know what's a hit and what's not a hit."
Phil Quartararo, executive vice-president of EMI north America, agrees: "Much of the marketing costs have already been paid for. The brand has been built."
Nevertheless, he notes that enticing people to buy their old favourites the second, third or fourth time around requires some clever, incremental marketing efforts. "Who was waiting for a new Beach Boys record? There may not be any existing demand, but we create a demand," Quartararo says of the successful greatest hits album, which sold especially well, arguably because of its summer release last year.
Record companies' marketing efforts for revamped back catalogue material have expanded in scale and diversity in the past two years. EMI's marketing of Tina Turner's All the Best has included working with Starbucks to sell the album across its US network of coffee shops and with Oprah Winfrey, the US talk show host, to have an episode of her television show devoted to Ms Turner. As a result the album reached the number two spot in Billboard's album chart.
Working with television advertisers to have an artist's old songs placed in commercials is another marketing method, which also generates licensing income for the record company.
"The days of putting out greatest hits records and coasting on the laurels of artists are gone," says Scott Pascucci, president of Warner Strategic Marketing. "There are lots of distractions -- multi-channel television, the internet -- so we have to market aggressively."
However, some people have been less than impressed with efforts to resell their back catalogues, including Axl Rose, the Guns N' Roses frontman, who initially filed a lawsuit against Geffen to prevent the greatest hits release, claiming that it would damage the band's reputation and distract from the new, uncompleted album. An album review on the allmusic.com website called last year's release a "slapdash compilation, hastily assembled" and criticised its omission of important songs.
John Mulvey, a music editor at Uncut magazine, says back catalogue releases are aimed at two target markets: "nostalgists" who buy albums that remind them of their youth and "classicists" who build collections of the classics, as well as every song or demo ("no matter how rubbish") recorded by their favourite artists. "The record company can exploit the nostalgists by selling greatest hits compilations, such as school disco, and ensnare classicists by offering deluxe issues or limited editions with extra discs, rarities, liner notes," says Mulvey.
Jeff Jones, executive vice-president of the catalogue division at Sony BMG, says: "From Louis Armstrong to AC/DC, we evaluate what shape the catalogue is in and create the right records at the right price for different retailers and consumers."
Timing, geography and fashion are also key to targeting consumers. Sony's re-release of Elvis Presley's singles in the UK that saw them hit the top of the charts was timed for the 70th anniversary of his birth.
To mark both the 40th anniversary of Nat King Cole's death and Black History Month in the US, EMI last month released a collection of 28 re-mastered Nat King Cole classics in six different versions across six global markets, based on which songs were most popular in each region. "If you like Usher now, you need to know who Nat is, because Usher probably listened to Nat when he was growing up," says Quartararo.
Less glittering artists can also find new life in reissues. "The music industry discovers constantly that no record in their back catalogue is so obscure that there isn't a market for it -- no matter how unsuccessful a record was at its time of release in 1970, it can magically find a niche market now," says Mulvey.
The internet, which has contributed to the spread of information and exploration of esoteric forms of music, is a primary factor. While to some extent it obviates the need for physical reissues -- the amount of back catalogue music available to download dwarfs that available in retail outlets -- some fans will still want to hold albums in their hands and put them in alphabetical order on a shelf.
For those who are not concerned with shelving, Resnikoff envisages elaborately conceived digital reissues available to download, complete with liner notes, photos and videos. However, he expresses concern for the person doing his job 25 years from now, who will be relying on material from current artists to reissue. "We will need another 25 years of music with staying power. Whether that is happening, I don't know -- only time will be the true barometer."
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