Today's Fun Fact: 100 Remix Albums
LaLa, 2023 June 29
I just realized today that Remix64's album database has exactly 100 albums in it as of right now, the latest release of Encore500
enjoying the honor of being the 100th remix album released since 1992. And that stopped me in my tracks.
Think about it: 31 years and 100 albums! That's an average of roughly 3 album releases every year. A total of 1660 tracks (!) published on those 100 albums. Folks, these numbers are staggering, especially when considering Commodore stopped producing the C64 and the Amiga in the mid-1990s, yet, decades later musicians are still publishing albums that feature music made on those old platforms. Who would've thought that back in the 20th century??? Mind blown.
The numbers are even more interesting when put on a graph that shows how many album releases there were year after year:
What's interesting to me on this graph is that during the past 10 years 59 albums were released - more than during the two decades (!) prior to 2013! So, maybe the rumors of the remix scene slowing down are a bit overblown?… No doubt, the emergence of crowd-funding helped increase the number of published albums during the last decade - which is just more proof that Commodore fans are willing to open their wallets for a good cause. Marcel Donné's new Sidologie series, Chris Abbott's 8-Bit Symphony and Hubbard projects, and Matt Gray's Reformation albums all contributed a lot to the increased number of remix content available to listeners in album format. But there were plenty of other albums published during the past decade from Chris Hülsbeck (e.g. Turrican Anthology), the FastLoaders (with no less than 3 triple-disc (!) albums, adding a huge number of tracks to that 1660 total), the German Remix Group, the SIDrip Alliance, just to name a few. And again, that's just during the last 10 years!
Yet, the top of the all-time album chart is dominated by remixes made before 2013:
Maybe folks just didn't have time to vote on the tracks of the newer albums? Maybe remix fatigue
has kicked in? Maybe they just don't think those newer albums are that much better? Hmm… But the good news it that currently there are about 600 album tracks that have a rating of orange or red - that means that over one-third of all those album tracks have been deemed at least very good
by the general public, which I think is a rather respectable ratio. I interpret that to mean that despite the surprisingly high number of album releases, most of them were actually enjoyed by quite a few of us!
I am not going to ramble on about stats and numbers any more, because that usually makes for a boring read, especially during the middle of summer when you might be reading this as you are relaxing on an exotic beach or camping on the top of a beautiful mountain. I'll just leave you here with a link to all the 100 albums that are listed on Remix64. I'm sure we've all had our own favorites over the decades (I certainly do!), so maybe now would be a good time to go back, dust off some old CDs and listen to them again. And relish the fact that decades later Commodore remix albums are still being produced by talented folks in high quality.
Cheers to that!
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