Unlimited editions: how the music box set has managed to survive

High-profile new box sets from Beyoncé, Radiohead and the Beatles are appealing to an audience still willing to spend big on physical media

For an album that is barely a year old, it’s somewhat astonishing that Beyoncé’s Lemonade is already getting the box set reissue treatment. But this marks a blurring of the lines between opportunistic cash-in and retrospective recalibration as art statement. Lemonade was the biggest-selling album of 2016, according to IFPI numbers, with global sales of 2.5m – but now you can preorder a $300 version with a lemon yellow vinyl edition, a 600-page hardback book on its creation, poems by Warsan Shire and a foreword by the academic Michael Eric Dyson. Keepers of the Real Music flame will no doubt roll their eyes in despair, but the How to Make Lemonade collection marks a step change in the music catalogue business, where anniversaries are no longer measured in decades and consumers are not stuck on the other side of 50.

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