Abba The Definitive Collection

The titles of hits compilations always deal in superlatives: "Greatest," "Best," "Very Best" – but the compilers of this ABBA collection have a special problem justifying the release of yet another such album after the multi-platinum success of 1992's ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits and its 1993 follow-up, More ABBA Gold: More ABBA Hits. (Indeed, the band was never shy about repackaging, issuing a Greatest Hits LP in 1976 as only its third U.S. album, followed by Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 in 1979 and The Singles [The First Ten Years] in 1982.) They have settled on The Definitive Collection and done their best to live up to the name. The 37-track double CD contains "for the first time exclusively collected in one package, each and every single as conceived and released by ABBA and their record company Polar Music between 1972 and 1982," writes annotator Carl Magnus Palm.

If you're an ABBA fan or just a fan of good music in general, this assortment of 35 music videos which spans ABBA's career from 1974's Waterloo to 1982's Under Attack is indeed definitive. Simply put, it's a fantastic collection of music and images that mostly focuses on the 1970's era of ABBA's career, because that's when they reigned supreme in their international pop music kingdom….

To celebrate ABBA's 40th anniversary, Polydor released the 2012 compilation The Essential Collection, which includes 39 songs by the Swedish hitmakers and a 12-page booklet. The two-CD album is basically an update of the 2002 compilation The Definitive Collection, adding several Japanese A-sides to that collection's track list ("Bang-a-Boomerang," "That's Me," "One Man, One Woman," and "Happy New Year"). The Essential Collection is also available as a DVD with 36 music videos and promo clips (including two previously unreleased Spanish videos) and as a limited deluxe edition with both CDs and the DVD in a hardcover book containing a 24-page booklet with liner notes by ABBA biographer Carl Magnus Palm.

"The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" is a 2003 special issue of American magazine Rolling Stone, and a related book published in 2005. The lists presented were compiled based on votes from selected rock musicians, critics, and industry figures, and predominantly feature British and American music from the 1960s and 1970s. From 2007 onwards, the magazine published similarly titled lists in other countries around the world.