The overpriced physical-media elephant in the room...

June 26, 2025

If you're a Springsteen fan visiting or returning to this website, you've probably read at least some of the initial reviews and other features about Tracks II: The Lost Albums published online at various sites over the last week or so, leading up to tomorrow's official release of the box-set. Perhaps you also noticed the absence of something rather significant in the overwhelming majority of those reviews and features...

To her credit, our fellow former Backstreets contributor Caryn Rose seems to be the only writer at a major outlet to have even acknowledged the overpriced physical-media (CDs/vinyl formats) elephant in the room. In her June 17th NPR article "The essential listening guide to Bruce Springsteen's 'Tracks II: The Lost Albums,'" Rose wrote, "It's worth mentioning that this set is significantly more expensive than the first Tracks, which weighed in at $49.99 for the four discs, roughly $100 in 2025 dollars. Tracks II: The Lost Albums is listed at $299.99 for the seven-CD version and $349.98 for the nine-LP set."

We'll go even further, especially since no other major music journalists/outlets seem interested in doing so... Tracks II, in its physical-media forms (CDs/vinyl,) is not only significantly more expensive than the original Tracks box; it is shaping up to be the most overpriced regularly issued/distributed physical box-set ever released by a major recording artist.

As of this writing, with the official-release-date only a day away, Amazon - often chief among retailers with the price to beat on items like this - still has the seven-CD version priced at only 13% below its $299.99 list-price, and the nine-LP set priced at only 6% below its $349.98 list-price. If anyone's still dreaming of any significant pre-release-day price-drops under Amazon's pre-order price guarantee... well, it looks like if dreams came true, now wouldn't that be nice. We haven't found any other outlets with pricing-plans significantly lower than Amazon's, either.

Don't get us wrong. Of course we remain excited about and interested in the seven albums' worth of previously unreleased Springsteen music headed our way. And those of us who are fine with the digital/streaming version of Tracks II are unlikely to have any problems with paying only about $70 or possibly nothing extra at all, depending on the terms of our streaming-service subscriptions, to dive into all of this forthcoming music.

But on behalf of anyone and everyone who still makes physical-media purchases, we ask whomever is responsible for the pricing of this box-set, openly and for the record... WTF?! You're selling the 9-vinyl-LPs box-set for about $350 and the 7-CDs box-set for about $300. The average new single-vinyl-LP release currently sells for $25-$30. So at its most expensive, the total price of the nine vinyl LPs in the vinyl version of Tracks II should be about $270. Are we expected to believe that the "100-page cloth-bound, hardcover book featuring rare archival photos, liner notes on each lost album from essayist Erik Flannigan, and a personal introduction on the project from Springsteen" truly justifies the extra $80 added to the price of the Tracks II vinyl version?

And the $300 price for the 7-CDs version of Tracks II is even more mind-boggling. Currently, a single-CD version of a new album usually sells for no more than about $18, and often for less than that. But even at $18 per CD (with one of those CDs - the Faithless album - clocking in at a mere 35 minutes or so, by the way,) that comes to $126, which doesn't cover even half of the 7-CDs version of Tracks II 's $300 price, making it appear that you're now attempting to sell that included "100-page cloth-bound, hardcover book" for a whopping $174! And speaking of that book, those essays, the Springsteen introduction, archival photos, etc., why can't those of us who are paying for the digital/streaming version of Tracks II purchase/receive a digital version of that book, as well, as a PDF or whatever?

Given Bruce Springsteen's 2021 music-rights sale to Sony Music Entertainment, it's no longer quite as clear exactly where to direct questions about pricing concerns like this, let alone focus any justifiable anger. What is very clear, however, is that somebody - and most likely somebody on the team at Sony/Columbia - gave the green light to the inordinately high pricing of the CD/LP box-sets of Tracks II: The Lost Albums. Here's hoping that today's active music press/media professionals - especially those with larger audiences, wider access, and greater resources - begin to treat this sad economic fact accordingly.

What's also clear is just how drastically the landscape has changed - in the music industry, in music journalism, and of course for us music fans, as well - since the late, great Tom Petty took his famous stand against another record company's relatively minor attempt at price-gouging. Glory days, indeed.