Plan B Forum

Where Have All The Bob Seger Albums Gone?
March 29, 201712:36 PM ET

Tim Quirk

There was no such thing as Classic Rock in 1976 — the phrase, and the radio format it inspired, wouldn't come into common usage until the mid-1980s. But there was already some notion of a rock and roll canon, a list of key albums that FM listeners needed to have in their collection. At the start of 1976, Bob Seger had zero albums on that list. Twelve months later, he had two: Live Bullet, the double LP documenting some blistering hometown sets at Detroit's Cobo Hall, and Night Moves, his first platinum album, whose title single would peak at No. 4 as 1977 began.

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It had taken Seger a decade of false starts to secure his place in the canon, and the very size of his back catalog and the way the band name kept changing — from The Bob Seger System to plain old Bob Seger to Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band — implied it had taken him a while to figure out what he was doing. Most visits, I slipped the Seger records back in the bin and went home with something else, though I congratulate my younger self for eventually gambling on Back in '72 and Smokin' O.P.'s.

The main thing that distinguishes the albums from '76 on is just how much better he got at distilling his various inspirations. Spending more time in better studios with more accomplished producers certainly helped, but so did the fact that Bullet, which was nothing but live versions of the most fully realized songs from his first eight records, had already proven there was a wider audience for Seger's particular mélange.

1980's Against the Wind continued Seger's platinum streak, and savvy licensing deals extended Seger's presence far beyond radio and record stores. The iconic scene in Risky Business where Tom Cruise lets the audience know just how liberating having your parent's mansion to yourself can be by lip-synching Seger's "Old Time Rock & Roll" while dancing around in his underwear rocketed the movie, the star and the song into the broader pop cultural firmament. In 1991, Chevrolet's use of "Like a Rock" to advertise their trucks proved so powerful that the campaign, which was planned to last three to six months, ran for 13 years.

Fast forward to this decade. I hear someone singing "If I Were a Carpenter," which reminds me Seger did a surprisingly heavy version of that song on Smokin' O.P.'s, which I haven't heard for a while. I reach for my copy, only to find that it's gone. This is bothersome, but correctable, I imagine. I am a gainfully employed adult, living in a city with multiple wonderful used record stores, plus there's an entire Internet at my fingertips. I decide to go on a spree, replacing not just the missing album, but finally adding the several I never purchased to my collection.

But I discover something odd: Bob Seger's old albums are not only missing from my shelves. They seem to be missing from the world.

Seger is one of the few remaining digital holdouts — there's nothing beyond the odd Christmas tune available on subscription services, and even on iTunes his only studio album for sale is 2014's Ride Out, which sits beside two anthologies and two live albums.

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Seger's absence from digital services, combined with the gradual disappearance of even physical copies of half his catalog, suggest a rare level of indifference to his legacy. I can't think of any other artist of his stature, with such a string of era-defining hits, who's been content to let his past work fade away in this manner. Contemporaries from the '70s and '80s regularly issue 25th anniversary editions of old LPs while basking in critical re-evaluations of their early work. Bruce Springsteen, the other artist I lingered over in those S bins in the 1970s, has embraced this reality. A significant chunk of fans who bought all his albums on vinyl as teenagers have since added anniversary editions (with tempting bonus CDs of outtakes and making-of documentaries on DVD) of Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River. But with Seger, all you hear is crickets. It's 2017, but for some reason it's easier for casual music fans to start playing deep cuts by Bing Crosby, who had a No. 1 record in 1940, than most anything by Bob Seger, who had a No. 1 record in 1980.

Seger declined to comment for this article, but we know for sure he has a dim view of portions of his catalog. As he told an interviewer in 2007, "There's a bunch of songs on Back In '72 that are bums. People keep saying: 'I want to hear that album.' And I go: 'No, that's okay.'"

We also know that, whatever Seger's thoughts about online music might be, he lets Punch Andrews make all the business calls, as he explained to the Wall Street Journal years ago: "I do music, he does business. It's a great division of labor and we don't get into each other's areas."

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Punch's opinion on going digital can be boiled down to: "Not yet in the artist's interest." And Seger's take is essentially: "Punch is usually right."

That chart suggests that, excepting spikes around new album releases and tours to promote them (as in '95, '06 and '14) or new compilations (as in '94, '03 and '11), Seger was reliably selling over 600,000 albums per year for most of the '90s and '00s. Whatever other artists might have been experiencing, the music business was still working the way it always had for Bob Seger in 2006. Face The Promise came out that September and was certified platinum before the year was out, as all but one of his albums since 1977 had managed.

And all those sales of Face The Promise were physical albums. Though iTunes was introduced in 2003 and digital sales saw huge growth year over year, Punch's suspicion of digital music services' effect on album oriented artists lasted until Seger's annual sales dropped below 350,000. That happened in 2010; in 2011 Seger's latest anthology, Ultimate Hits, was released on iTunes as well as physically. But 2011 proved poor timing to make a big deal about finally coming to iTunes. The next year, download sales would plateau, before decreasing after 2013, as on demand streaming came to represent the largest share of music consumption.

By that point, even Bob Seger fans had stopped buying records the way they used to. 2014's Ride Out has yet to crack 250,000, despite generally positive reviews (and a nifty, horn-powered cover of Billy Bragg and Wilco's Woody Guthrie cover, "California Stars").

Broadcast radio spins provide another gauge of how Seger's presence might have waxed or waned over time. Several classic rockers have had remarkably steady numbers, even as digital distribution upended the rest of the music business in the new millennium. Look how consistent spins of Led Zeppelin and Queen have been, per Mediabase's "Big Picture" chart, which has tracked total plays across the major stations in the most popular formats for any artist with a song in the top 1000 since 2006:

These two artists provide a pretty good illustration of classic rock acts who've remained culturally relevant enough to keep songs from a quarter century ago in the top 1000. Now let's see how Seger's totals compare.

Holy canoli. A decade ago, Seger was being spun by DJ's almost as frequently as Led Zeppelin, but he'd plummeted 80% by 2014, before dropping out of the top 1000 songs list entirely last year.

Narrowing our focus just to Classic Rock stations, we can see similar signs of trouble: Per Mediabase, Seger was the seventh-most-played artist in the format in 2000. In 2008, he was No. 13. Last year, He was No. 27.

(I don't know if cassettes counted among them).

oldr_n_wsr wrote:I still have the Bob Seger vinyl LP's I bought way back when...

RayThom wrote:
Speaking of Bob Seger, I have his complete vinyl discography:

Gob wrote:... You have my every sympathy.

RayThom wrote: Gob, you're probably a diehard Silverchair and/or Rolf Harris fan so anything else just doesn't measure up to your standards.