ABBA On The Web - September 2003
This issue’s featured web site is another long time favourite. It’s ABBA – The Releases, created and maintained by Walter Veldman from The Netherlands.
ABBA – The Releases describes itself as “A web-site with information about the various ABBA and solo activities released all over the world through the years”, which is indeed true. You’ll find within the site not only ABBA records released around the world, but also records released by Agnetha and Frida before, during and after ABBA, Benny’s and Björn’s pre-ABBA bands The Hep Stars and the Hootenanny Singers, plus their works as a duo, their post-ABBA musical projects and productions for Gemini and Josefin Nilsson. It’s huge!
My favourite and most visited section is of course the ABBA section. It’s easy to navigate around the site. On the left is a menu of various categories – main albums, compilations, singles in various formats, box sets, etc, and clicking on a selection will bring up the contents of that category in the main frame to the right.
Clicking on a record title or sleeve in the main frame will reveal the track listing of each record, sleeve images, plus the release details in a multitude of countries. There’s also information about the variations between different issues, such as different cover or alternate tracks – you’ll be surprised at just how different almost every ABBA album and single was in each country during the 1970s, something that doesn’t happen so much these days.
In the case of ABBA’s studio albums, the original Swedish/Polar releases are listed first, so that you can see the albums as ABBA intended them. After that (and for compilations and singles) each country is listed alphabetically.
As well as being able to look up each album, single etc, in the Track Listing category you can look up each song to find out what main CD it appears on. This is a quick and easy way to find out if a particular song is still available.
Each of the other sections is set up the same as the ABBA section, so it’s just as easy to review each discography.
I’m sure you’ll find it easy to spend hours perusing ABBA – The Releases! I can tell you that it’s been a great resource for me over the past few years.
