I agree.

How about someone encountering the band for the first time, ten or twenty years from now?

What they'll find is Unplugged with Eddie's goat yowling instead of "Oh Beth", the 1991 meets 2003 "snakes in a panic" version of Alone, Footsteps with harmonica, Who You Are with alternate lyrics, etc.

All of the original versions of these will, by then, have been long out of print.

I am myself
Like Rod, somehow

I think you are underestimating the band's cash-in potential of future b sides box sets.

This is also one of the reasons something like Spotify will never work for me; there's no transparency as to what version of a song you're listening to, which mix, which mastering, etc.

Cmon man, everything is out there. These days you just have to google it...it was more fun back then when you had to go look for it...so, the idea of a new fan going into that world is pretty cool to me...Learning about the differences between what he thought it was the ¨definitive¨version with the one in a b side.

Still, i get what you mean...and yeah, i think eventually they will release a sort of comp with everything there.

The original Drifting is a great, great song. The Lost Dogs version sounds like Ed is constipated and it ruins the whole thing. Case closed.

I actually prefer the LD version. Im glad i have it.

Woe to all the kids coming of age today, with no way to track down a record store with the $20 Japanese import of a long discontinued single so they can finally hear the canon version of a b-side. Why must we make it so hard to access music? It was so much easier when we were young and $50 dollar bootleg cds put all the random tracks right at your fingertips.

That's totally cool, but it should be called "Drifting (2003 Version)" or something like that. Give the new fans a frame of reference for the growth a song has taken, you know?

New fans? I thought they were just milking all us old guys all these years.

When Trump gets a nuke dropped on the US, we'll be able to live off a crude mush of Deep magazines and Showbox DVD grime for at least a couple weeks.

Lol. Dude you are eway off here. Someone encountering the band 20 years from now for the firs time would give two fucking shits about he nitpicking you are putting out here.

I agree with VinylGuy in this thread.

These sound like the grievances of a man once or more duped by the more expensive (identical) import versions.

Entirely fresh takes would be far less objectionable, I think, though likely still inferior. What they gave us was kind of the musical equivalent of cropping an old ex-girlfriend out of a family photo (damn near literally, in the case of "Oceans"). I don't really care for the argument that people thirty years from now won't know the difference so what the hell; there's still something that just rubs me the wrong way about this kind of revisionist history, particularly when it comes in the guise of "correcting" some previous error, like Soundgarden is currently doing with their "Ultramega OK" reissue. "No really, this is what this 30 year-old album was supposed to sound like all along!" It just seems so pointlessly vain. You feel like you could improve upon something you did 10, 20, 30 years ago? Join the club, dude.

And while, no, I don't foresee any especially dire consequences stemming from someone in 2035 mistakenly inferring that "Footsteps" has always had a harmonica in it, I can't help but wonder whether people would feel stronger about this sort of thing if it was being done to more canonical works -- like, if all future pressings of "Vitalogy" contained the full Atlanta '94 version of "Better Man" instead of the extant hybrid, or if Eddie suddenly decided he didn't like the second verse to "Jeremy" and changed a bunch of the words on all future issues of "Ten." Does the fact that these are "only B-sides" change the philosophy at all?

correct

quit meddlin'

This is pretty much exactly what happened to me with The Who's catalog.

This is, more or less, what's happened with the recent No Code reissue which contains the RVM version of Who You Are with alternate lyrics.

As far as I know, they also correspondingly updated the digital versions available (eg. iTunes, HD Tracks), so the only way to get the "real" version is to track down a CD - and what happens once the CD is no longer in print (which will inevitably happen at some point)?

It was a dark time