Similarly, our understanding of certain styles of music is beholden to reissues, where collectors and archivists assembled our messy past into compelling, sensible stories. Often, the credit for the first major various artists reissue is given to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, the 1952 project that collected regional 78s recorded between 1927 and 1932. Anthology was a feat of research—Smith culled it from his prodigious library, assembling songs according to region and theme, a process that helped turn this vast stack of records into interwoven narratives. Smith's achievement had considerable cultural impact, not only preserving the past but also changing the course of the present. Without it, protest singers and collegiate harmony groups may not have been able to score the soundtrack of the '50s and early '60s. Anthology created the canon and its own context; it enshrined certain songs and, by doing so, suggested to Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and many other musicians what folk music should be.

Other collections of old 78s had considerable impact during the early years of long-players because they made discovery of the past easy. The 1961 Robert Johnson collection King of the Delta Blues Singers influenced a generation of baby boomers, as evidenced by its placement on the cover on Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home. Recordings squirreled away on shellac were accessible again; they could be found in record stores, purchased, and passed along.

Such archival reissues demonstrated there was a dedicated market for older music, but perhaps a better indication for how the industry could profit from quick repackages of the past was Art Laboe's Oldies but Goodies series, which debuted in 1959 with a record of doo-wop hits. It proved so popular that it generated a tribute hit via Little Caesar & the Romans' 1961 smash "Those Oldies but Goodies (Remind Me of You)," and by the time the series reached its 15th volume in 1985, various artists albums became a staple of the record industry.

These collections were safe, easy bets for record labels big and small. Easy usually means cheap, and there's little question that throughout the '70s and into the '80s, such collections were often trashy exercises in nostalgia, released by cut-rate labels who peddled their wares on television, where the idea was to get suckers to pay more placing an order on the telephone than they would shell out in a store.

K-Tel, the most famous of these labels, became the byword for this whole underbelly of the music industry, its very name conjuring shoddy, careless products assembled with no thought in mind other than a quick buck. The label was indiscriminate, packaging oldies for every demographic in every country: For some reason, Canadians were the only ones who got the nonsensical Pinball Rock, but K-Tel bundled plenty of hits under the 20 Original Hits, 20 Original Stars umbrella, scoured up some old novelties for Goofy Greats, targeted dancers with Disco Double and Disco Rocket, and served soft rock fans Emotions.

K-Tel's sleaze wound up countered by the impish geeks at Rhino, who eventually set the standard for archival pop music reissues. Starting as a record shop in the shadow of UCLA, Rhino became a label in 1978 and, after a series of marginally popular novelty singles, they turned their attention toward resuscitating their favorite out-of-print records. The imprint had good taste and, better still, good timing, arriving just before the compact disc transformed the economics of the business.

When the popularity of the CD skyrocketed in the back half of the '80s, Rhino was poised to take advantage of a new market thirsty to repurchase old favorites in better fidelity. It wasn't the only boutique label specializing in older music: The German imprint Bear Family began exhaustively chronicling American roots music in 1975, and Mosaic started releasing vinyl box sets of classic early jazz recordings in 1983, both specializing in scholarly, complete overviews.

Meanwhile, Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab took a different route, cherry-picking the best of the best of classic albums and reissuing them in the best-possible audio—a strike against the increasingly shoddy vinyl pressings of the '70s. Labels were fine with licensing popular titles, including Steely Dan's Katy Lied and Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, because it was essentially an addendum to the market; they were appealing to people who already had the record and cared about quality. Even Capitol allowed the Beatles, the most reliable cash cow in the industry, to have their catalog released as a Mobile Fidelity box in 1982.

Initially, major label CD reissues were rushed to market, struck from safety masters originally intended for vinyl, but by the late '80s the majors started to co-opt the innovations of Rhino, Bear Family, Mosaic, and Mobile Fidelity, turning out archival releases that were thoroughly researched, rich in rarities, and sterling in sound. Like so many other times in the music business, independents pioneered new territory and found where the cash reserves lay—and then the majors followed suit. In turn, audiences benefitted from this trawl through the vaults. B-sides and unreleased songs turned familiar, alternate mixes and full concerts were unearthed, lost albums became canon.

Individual artists certainly gained from this boundless expansion. Bob Dylan's 1985 five-LP Biograph pioneered the concept of the career-spanning, rarities-laden box set, a blueprint that was followed by major labels once the CD boom exploded in the late '80s. The watershed moment arrived in 1988, when Eric Clapton's sprawling career was summarized in the four-disc Crossroads, a set filled with unreleased—often unbootlegged—material. Crossroads won two Grammy awards and sold over three million copies, opening the floodgates for major label reissues. The next year, David Bowie licensed some of his catalog to Rykodisc, a Massachusetts-based indie who developed an innovative campaign for their reissue campaign: Each of the albums was freshly remastered and expanded with bonus tracks of rare alternate versions and unreleased cuts, a concept that had yet to be exploited.