Abba The 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.

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.

This interesting compilation offers an introduction to the 1970s pop superstars from Sweden. Best 1000 collects a smattering of the quartet's hits, including "Waterloo" and "S.O.S.," along with unearthing forgotten tracks like "When I Kissed The Teacher." ABBA is a Swedish pop supergroup formed in Stockholm in 1972 by Agnetha Faltskog, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. The group's name is an acronym of the first letters of their first names. They became one of the most commercially successful acts in the history of popular music, topping the charts worldwide from 1974 to 1982. ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest 1974, giving Sweden its first triumph in the contest. They are the most successful group to have taken part in the competition. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010.

The 2008 nine-disc box Albums is neither the first ABBA multi-disc set nor the first time the pop group's albums have been collected and housed in a box set, but it is the first time a set of their complete recordings has been widely disseminated (such are the perks of being a companion to an international blockbuster) and it's the best of the lot, containing all eight of the group's albums (for the record: Ring Ring, Waterloo, ABBA, Arrival, The Album, Voulez-Vous, Super Trouper, The Visitors), plus a 17-track rarities disc that rounds up non-LP singles (including "Fernando" and "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)"), songs sung in Swedish, and plain oddities like a medley of the American folk songs "Pick a Bale of Cotton," "On Top of Old Smokey," and "Midnight Special."

Twenty-selection of the best romantic songs from the record label "Arcade", (more than 300 songs that have long become a classic music). It is probably easier to list those artists and those styles, those countries and continents that are not in this collection. It is just necessary to listen.