Quote Originally Posted by Fourtopsbiggestfan View Post
No reason why haven't got expanded editions of the tops. For some reason the the Supremes get all the attention. They did way too many standards and not as well.
There are a few reasons for this:
1.) The Supremes have more devoted fan base. That's not to say that there aren't Four Tops fans out there, but the Supremes were a bigger group with a household name star who is still touring and still having hits on the Billboard charts today. While people may know of Levi Stubbs, he's not going to have the same draw as Diana Ross. If Diana Ross is still out there in the public eye, a record label is more inclined to release material from that artist's catalog. The Four Tops don't have that same draw.

2.) The Four Tops' Lost & Found collection wasn't a big seller. A collection like that is catered to a very specialized audience: die-hard Four Tops and Motown fans. So your market isn't going to be expansive. Granted the collection was unreleased material and didn't contain hits on it, but when a record company looks at album/artists and see the sales aren't there then that will prevent them from wanting to do more releases on that artist. It doesn't mean that they won't do some releases, but it certainly doesn't help the cause.

3.) Universal has dropped the ball on all Motown releases. How many Motown catalog releases have we seen directly from Universal in the past 2 years? This doesn't include the releases from third-party labels. Universal just isn't producing and releasing the Motown catalog. We had to wait over a year between Supremes releases. Is it due to lack of demand? No. Lack of promotion on their end? Absolutely. I honestly believe if they actually invested in the promotion of these releases then it would boost sales, but when all you see is a little blurb on Facebook, how do they expect this stuff to sell? You see how hard and long it is taking to complete the Supremes catalog. Motown 60 is next year. I'm not expecting too much as Motown 50 was such a dud.

Andy and George have expressed that they would love to do expanded editions on the Four Tops, Vandellas, etc. but they want to finish the Supremes/Diana Ross catalog first. I would love to see expanded editions on the other Motown groups and I'm hopeful one day we will, but there's only a handful of people working on the catalog [[Harry, Andy, George, Keith, Kevin). There's only so much they can do especially within a major record corporation such as Universal.