Australia --- UK & Europe --- USA & Canada --- Korea

Most compilation albums rave about how many big chart hits they contain. Well, not this one. It could be claimed that there ain't a single Top 40 hit among the 583 tracks in this project, but two of them did hit #40 (in Australia) for a week each, so it's not quite true. That's why this project has been called "Off Target". These are the hits that should have been, but weren't. Why did these tracks miss out? It's definitely not for lack of quality - the tracks themselves bear testament to that. In many cases it was just a lack of promotion or disinterest from various record companies and radio stations around the world.

The original concept of this series was to include tracks which missed the Top 40 on the Australian, British and American charts. This is almost exactly true for Australia, as mentioned above. The other two countries did send a few of these tracks into their Top 40s, but by no means can any of these tracks be considered an international hit. So, although the original concept has not been strictly followed, it was decided to overlook the exceptions.

As most of these tracks are also quite rare, their sources are not always easy to locate. About half have been remastered from vinyl records (this ratio increases to about 75% for the megamixes), and a few from downloaded MP3s found online after much diligent searching. While all audio has been remastered as best as possible, defects in the sound quality of some tracks may be evident due to their source format. Details of the source format of each track in this project are available at this link.

No doubt many of these songs will be unfamiliar to the masses. So come on, enjoy a journey of discovery as you listen to these "hits that missed"!

Project structure:
This project consists of 6 discs each for Australia, UK/Europe and US/Canada, plus 2 discs for Korea: a total of 20 discs. Each disc contains 20 tracks. An extra disc of megamixes is also available to accompany each main disc, except Volume 5 and both Korean discs: a total of 15 discs. Each megamix disc contains up to 12 megamixes from the main disc, with some also containing bonus tracks where not enough megamixes were available.

Where a megamix disc exists, a 2CD set is available which pairs the main disc and its sister megamixes volume together. There are 15 of these.

The entire project therefore contains 50 items, as displayed in the table. Catalogue numbers link to details for each item.

A PDF index of this project is also available.