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Old 11-05-2019, 12:07 PM
khouri
khondo dweller
 
Join Date: Mar 2007
Posts: 581
Re: DRIFT Series 1 - New album, Nov 1, 2019
Quote:
Originally Posted by 34958hq439-qjw9v5jq298v5j View Post
well there's a big difference in the way music is consumed now as opposed to then. I think the Riverruns were hurt by the fact that they weren't in stores, weren't on iTunes, you had to go through a clunky storefront that was down a lot of the time. maybe the fact that it was just one continuous track turned some people off too. I have no idea what the sales were, I know we all went nuts over it but I never got the sense that the public at large was that interested. It kinda made sense that by '06 they were more focused on the next CD
I've always thought that the delivery system and what I perceived to be Underworld just being cheap severely hurt Riverrun's appeal. The Underworld website itself has to the best of my recollection never been particularly intuitive, always seeming to be hand-coded (or might as well be), and the Riverrun era especially. Zip files and PDFs you had to buy on a dodgy platform, it was all extremely inelegant. And the accompanying physical products were mainly remixes! That for the most part sucked! And the major physical release of the time was Live in Japan, the kind of product we'd been begging for, and it was limited only to that region. In other words, the group did everything they could to make Riverrun and its attendant content as unbuyable as possible to all but the most hardcore fan.

These days there's a much better technological apparatus in place for this kind of thing. Social media, streaming, YouTube, all sorts of tools to deliver any sort of content at all. And the advent of the deluxe edition boxset offers a physical product that's far superior to a traditional CD and jewel case (NIN refuses to make CDs ever again, supposedly, moving strictly to vinyls and downloads). As ever Underworld were ahead of their time, but Drift takes judicious advantage of all this.

I suspect that if Underworld repackaged Riverrun it would be worth the effort. It remains a kind of holy grail for new Underworld fans who weren't around to get it the first time. Imagine a boxset with full size artwork, books of jam, high fidelity sound, liner notes, etc.? And promoted properly and enhanced through all the channels mentioned above. It'd be marvelous.