by Michael McCarthy
Selena Gomez released an excellent new album last Friday. It’s billed as Selena Gomez and benny blanco (for some reason he refuses to capitalize his name), blanco being her producer boyfriend. The album is supposed to tell the story of their romance. Previously, the two collaborated on a track called “I Can’t Get Enough” that was the only Selena Gomez single in the last 15 years that I didn’t like. I mean, I would go so far as to say that I hated it. It just wasn’t a very good song and something about it annoyed me. Fortunately, the rest of the album is really nothing like that. Most of the songs are highly infectious, highlights being “Younger And Hotter Than Me” and “Sunset Blvd”. I guess I would loosely describe it as an electronic pop album. If I had to compare it to one of her other albums it would be Stars Dance, which is my favorite Selena Gomez album.
Since the album dropped last Friday, Selena Gomez and blanco have released eight different versions in her digital store. They’re only 5 dollars each but some of them only have one bonus track. So they’re literally trying to get fans to buy the album again and again to get all of the bonus tracks. Personally, I bought five versions. I would buy the others but I don’t have the money. And, unfortunately, they’re only selling them for a limited time so I don’t know if I’ll be able to get them when I do have the money. I think they’re making them a limited edition thing because they want the album to debut on the charts at number one. If they weren’t trying for a high chart position, they obviously wouldn’t be selling eight different versions of the same album in an effort to drive sales way up.
The only time I’ve seen this happen before was with Halsey’s latest album. She released around six different versions, which were also sold for 5 dollars each.
Actually, Kylie Minogue did the something similar with her latest album, Tension II, but she only released two alternate digital versions. One of them had extended versions of all 16 songs and the other one had instrumental versions of all 16 songs. So at least with those you were getting 16 otherwise unavailable tracks for your five dollars. Having to spend five dollars a pop to get these Selena Gomez bonus tracks is kind of ridiculous. Well, to be fair, one of the versions that I bought does have instrumental versions of all of the songs. And another version has an extra track in between each song where Selena Gomez talks about the songs. So with those two, you are getting 14 otherwise unavailable tracks for your 5 bucks per album download. But then some of the others literally just have one bonus track. One of the versions that I haven’t bought is a “slowed and reverbed” version. That’s become a new trend as of late. Artists release an album then release alternate versions of the same album where they’ve sped up or slowed down the tracks and/or added reverb. I have never bought such a version of anything. If I had the money I probably would be a sucker and get the Selena Gomez version because I like her so much but I just have no interest in listening to versions of albums where they’ve just changed the playback speed. You can easily open the tracks in a program like Audacity and change the playback speed yourself if you’re really curious to hear the songs slowed down so much that it sounds like the singer is a male. So I don’t see much reason to pay for tracks that I could just as easily make myself. If artists wanted to make different versions of the songs where they actually played and performed the songs at different speeds, then the vocals would still sound like the singer normally sounds. But when you literally just take a song and change the playback speed, the vocalist no longer sounds like themselves. Slowed down tracks will usually make a female singer sound like a male singer. And sped up tracks can almost make it sound like you’re listening to The Chipmunks. I just don’t know why anyone would want to listen to that crap, much less spend their money on it.
Whether you should buy any of these bonus track versions of I Said I Love You First obviously depends on how much of a Selena Gomez fan you are. I’m certainly not about to suggest that anyone has to buy every version to be a proper fan because the fact of the matter is that a lot of people don’t have the money to do so. But I would at least buy one version of the album for 5 bucks. That will get you the 14 main tracks of the album. One of them is, sadly, “I Can’t Get Enough” but the other 13 tracks are great and you won’t find a better album for five bucks.
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