It happens every year at this time: Alongside the new releases come anthologies and best-of sets from esteemed acts. Nobody squawks when a veteran paws through the CDs and assorted one-off singles to select his or her most representative work. Greatest-hits sets - and those out this fall include the first John Mellencamp anthology (Oct. 19), plus sets by Shania Twain (Nov. 9) and Marilyn Manson (Sept. 28) - can be a guide to years of work, an introduction for the curious and, often, a way for an artist to mark the end of a chapter.

This year, though, the catalog-maximization activity has reached absurd extremes.

We start with the strange case of Joni Mitchell. In 1996, the legendary singer-songwriter put out two career-overview collections, Hits and Misses, designed to showcase her commercial high points and pieces she thought were unfairly overlooked.

Both were solid sets, but apparently they weren't enough. Mitchell's nostalgia trip continued with the 2002 Travelogue, a dual-disc live affair that found her reworking many of the same songs with pianist Herbie Hancock and a 70-piece orchestra. And 2003 brought the boxed The Complete Geffen Recordings.

In July, Mitchell put out The Beginning of Survival, a set of her "political" songs. And last week, she issued a great-hits über-disc, Dreamland, that also includes reproductions of her paintings.

Mitchell has announced she's retired, that she won't record new material again, and she's got every right to work the catalog. But as she well knows from her visual art, overloading the canvas can obscure the overall effect. Those just discovering Mitchell may be confused by all the options, so here's some obvious advice: Skip the anthologies and go straight to her core catalog, from 1971 to 1976: Blue, Court and Spark, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, and Hejira.

Then there's media favorite Michael Jackson. The King of Pop is gunning to become the King of Repackaging: His discography already includes a Greatest Hits History Vol. 1, the two-disc Number Ones, and that curious hedge of old and new material known as HIStory Vol. 1: Past, Present and Future.

Most of the surveys offer the same hits, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for another: The Ultimate Michael Jackson, due Oct. 19, is five discs of the classics, plus demos, early versions, fizzled latter-day singles, and other unreleased arcana. Does anybody need this?

Another headscratcher arrived this week: The Very Best of Macy Gray. The mercurial singer with the distinctive rasp has issued a grand total of three studio albums. She's had exactly one formidable hit ("I Try," from her 1999 debut On How Life Is) and a few tracks that generated scattered radio or club attention.

Sure, some singles have been on soundtracks or are otherwise unavailable on her albums, but it's premature for Gray to be anthologizing considering that some with far more extensive backlogs - such as Britney Spears, who will clean up with a hits set in November - have waited to release a best-of. One explanation: Gray and her label, Epic Records, have apparently parted ways. Officials at the label, enmeshed in a massive merger with BMG, won't confirm anything, and her management didn't return calls for comment.

Business acrimony, or just plain business, is the worst reason to confuse consumers with multiple versions of the same material. Gray's albums haven't all been home runs. They were cohesive efforts, with moments of highly accessible music and interesting experimentation. Hopefully they'll be around awhile, though these days when a relationship sours, labels are quick to delete individual titles and offer only the anthologies.

Maybe that's why Mitchell is flooding the market with ways to purchase the same songs. Sure, it's nice to have all her thoughts on the decay of society in one handy volume (The Beginning of Survival), but as a musical journey, it's a tad shrill; the songs have more resonance in the albums from which they were culled, alongside less hectoring expressions.

These odd best-ofs are another sign of an industry in trouble, another way that corporations paranoid about vanishing revenue from Internet piracy trample the relationship between artist and listener to squeeze out the quick buck.

In the past, executives wouldn't rush out a repackage to help recoup the outsized (and, in some cases, irresponsible) advances they paid artists in previous years. There was a sensitivity to the impact the sets would have on an artist's catalog and subsequent career. The best gathered historically or stylistically cohesive material to make arguments the original albums didn't. Sly and the Family Stone's Greatest Hits and the Bob Marley Legend set are benchmarks for their depth and amazing sequence. Such albums provided new perspectives and, in the process, made superlatives such as "the ultimate" ring true.