Best of Soft Rock

By the mid-'70s, Soft Machine had moved from the global Columbia Records family to Harvest, a British label specializing in U.K. and European rock bands. After their pivotal albums Fifth, Six, and Seven, the group acclimated guitarist Allan Holdsworth, and eventually John Etheridge, to their more distinctly instrumental jazz-rock sound, while retaining electric bass guitarist Roy Babbington, keyboardist and reedman Karl Jenkins, drummer John Marshall, and keyboardist Mike Ratledge. Long gone were the days when Kevin Ayers and Daevid Allen identified the group's more hippie-ish sound, Robert Wyatt was a driving force in their collective consciousness, Elton Dean was injecting exciting creative improvising saxophone, and Hugh Hopper was their definitive bassist…

20th Century Masters – The Millennium Collection: The Best of Eric Clapton is a compilation album by the British rock musician Eric Clapton. It was released on 15 June 2004, by Polydor Records and is part of Universal's 20th Century Masters – The Millennium Collection series. The compilation album has eleven tracks that Clapton recorded in the 1970s both as a solo artist and with Derek and the Dominos. Glyn Johns produced the album in association with Tom Dowd. Although the release sold 1,366,610 copies in the United States, it has not been certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Folk-pop singer/songwriter Stephen Bishop has bounced around from one record label to another, but he had his greatest success on the ABC label in the mid-'70s when he scored the Top 40 pop hits "Save It for a Rainy Day" and "On and On." In fact, his two ABC LPs, Careless (1977) and the gold-certified Bish (1978), are his only ones to sell well enough to make the charts. ABC was absorbed into MCA, which is now part of Universal, the major label responsible for the 20th Century Masters/The Millennium Collection series of discount-priced best-of compilations, and the Bishop number draws heavily from those two albums, which provide nine of the 12 tracks. Unusually for the series, however, the compilers have licensed a track from outside Universal, Bishop's chart-topping adult contemporary hit "It Might Be You," the theme from the 1983 movie Tootsie, which is controlled by Warner Brothers Records.

Joan Osborne set the world on fire for a few minutes back in the '90s with her reading of Eric Bazilian's "One of Us," a single that dominated the charts for the better part of a year and continues to get radio play. The album, Relish, sold into the millions, making everybody and her brother (especially the folks at her label Interscope) think she was going to be a superstar. It didn't work out that way. Despite being one of the greatest R&B and soul singers around (before she played in the big leagues she issued a few independent recordings on her own Womanly Hips label that offer stellar proof of this), she got her rep as a pop singer; worse yet, as part of the '90s wave of female acts who dominated the charts for a little while and was a part of the first Lilith Fair, while singing pop songs at half power no less. She recorded one more album for Interscope (which is owned by Universal).