The Smiley Smile Message Board

I found this very interesting!  "The Riff Report," an online site, equates the new Beatles Anthology 4 release with mistakes The Beach Boys' releases have made recently!  Apparently the new Beatles release only reached #48 in the charts, while all the other original releases charted at #1.

You can read the whole thing at the site below...

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https://theriffreport.co.uk/05/12/2025/%F0%9F%A4%98-the-beatles-anthology-4-face-planted-at-48-and-fans-are-tamping-mun/

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3. APPLE IS MAKING THE SAME MISTAKES AS THE BEACH BOYS’ LEGACY TEAM

That’s right — we’ve reached the “Beach Boys comparison” level.
And that’s never a good thing. 😬

Like the Boys’ management, Apple seems obsessed with:

Appeasing newer fans
Polishing everything too clean
Forgetting who buys the physical products
Forgetting who’s been loyal for sixty flipping years
The Anthology sets were MADE for hardcore fans.
Not TikTok day-trippers.

You can’t alienate your base and expect the charts to stay tidy.

There's plenty to unpack and criticize about the recent Beatles Anthology revamp.

But the audience a Beatles release is aimed at versus a Beach Boys release are *not* the same, on multiple levels. Different eras, different types of materials, different fan base sizes, etc.

And it's not even fair to compare "Anthology 4" in 2025 to the three original Anthology albums in 95/96. 1995/96 was a peak era for physical media/CD, an ideal era for boomers with disposable income being at just the right age and buying up all sorts of Beatles merch, and those three original Anthology albums in 95/96 were the *first* opening of the studio vaults, and were promoted by a TV miniseries that was watched on ABC by 47 million people.

"Anthology 4" was a straggler bonus set attached to a *reissue* of an old series of albums from 30 years ago. Apple probably thought it wouldn't sell that well on its own considering the majority of its contents were previously released, which is probably why Apple originally *wasn't* going to put it out on its own and was only tossing it into a boxed set as a bonus.