Shine a Light is the ninth concert album to be released by the Rolling Stones.

The album used a stripped-down style reminiscent of Some Girls, but with a harder, more contemporary edge.

The band that proclaimed itself "The Greatest Rock & Roll Band in the World" has long since represented rock's most overarching confluence of art and commerce--with a distinct emphasis on the latter in recent decades--a notion this 40-track, five-decade-spanning anthology can't completely escape.

James Brown, Al Green, Otis Redding, Muddy Waters, Sly & The Family Stone, The Beach Boys etc. Everyone is on here.

A unique 4-CD collection of classic interviews with The Rolling Stones, spanning the whole of the band's turbulent existence from the early 1960's to the present day.

This is the seventh live Stones album and the second to appear in three years.

It's no use comparing Stones albums to Exile on Main St. anymore; the world's greatest rock & roll band clearly substitutes finances for passion these days.

Full title - Jump Back: The Best Of The Rolling Stones 1971-1993'. Never released in the U.S., this collection features 18 of the Stones' best hits after leaving Abkco in 1971, all remastered from the original masters via 20 bit technology. Features 'Start Me Up', 'Brown Sugar', 'It's Only Rock 'N' Roll', 'Mixed Emotions', 'Angie', 'Miss You', 'Hot Stuff', 'Beast Of Burden', 'Wild Horses', 'Bitch', 'Undercover Of The Night', & more! Virgin. 1994. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

The most comprehensive anthology of the Rolling Stones' prime early work collects every single from the beginning up through 1971, A- and B-sides.

Often viewed as the band's last great album, Tattoo You contributed one true classic, "Start Me Up," to the Stones' canon.

A fresh, uncompromising attempt to incorporate 1978 pop techniques into the band's familiar sound, Some Girls opens with the disco sass of "Miss You" and closes with the self-destructive punk of "Shattered." (Both songs, especially "Miss You," with its distinctive Mel Collins sax solo, remain live showstoppers.)

1977's Love You Live lands near the top of the list of the Stones' half-dozen live albums; especially for the brief set of Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, and Howlin' Wolf stuff recorded at Toronto's El Mocambo (while Keith Richards was waiting out the legal hassles of a heroin bust five days earlier).

From the swaggering frustration in the first song ("I only get my rocks off while I'm sleeping," Mick Jagger sings in the hyper "Rocks Off"), the Stones speed through familiar neighborhoods of country, blues, and R&B on Exile.

It's the rare greatest-hits album that takes on a life of its own. Generally, best-of collections are superceded by updated retrospectives. Hot Rocks is one of the rare exceptions to the rule.

"Sister Morphine," the heart of guitarist Mick Taylor's first full studio album with the Stones, doesn't get the airplay of "Brown Sugar" or "Wild Horses."

Introduced at the beginning of their second live album as "the greatest rock & roll band in the world," the Stones come off instead as perhaps the world's sloppiest.

One of the Stones' most beloved albums, 1969's Let It Bleed was a benchmark for several reasons.

This second greatest hits collection serves up the band's classic mid- '60s period, capped off by the death of Brian Jones for whom this collection is dedicated.

Opening with "Sympathy for the Devil," the Stones' infamous we-are-evil poem, this all-original 1968 album began a quality streak almost unmatched in rock & roll.

The Stones began their transitional period, from reinvigorating R&B standards (on their early albums) to reinventing rock & roll (on the brilliant four-album streak beginning with Beggars Banquet), on this underrated 1967 collection.

Clearly their answer to Sgt. Pepper, or at least "All You Need is Love," Satanic Majesties is actually as sloppy an artifact as Flowers.

So the Stones take off a few months to write, get arrested, the usual, and their U.S. label tosses together the 1967 version of December's Children, complete with tackily precious "psychedelic" artwork.

For this 1966 album, one Stone asserted himself even more than Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who for the first time wrote all the album's songs.

This one misses a golden opportunity by not including "Get Off of My Cloud" ("Just 'cause you feel so good, d'ya have to drive me out of my head?"), but that's about the only mistake it makes.

The covers on this 1965 gem are a bit more obscure than on the Stones' first two long-players, not a bad thing for a band still getting its writing chops together (if admirably; "Heart of Stone" and "Surprise, Surprise" are particularly strong).

Before this 1965 blues-rock masterpiece, the Stones were the best of the many British bands living out their Muddy Waters dress-up fantasies.

The best of the Stones' first three albums of hopped-up R&B, 12 x 5 hints at why there was more to this quintet than to blues-reviving brothers like the Yardbirds and the Animals.

The Stones got their groove on early, making one of the few originals here, the blues pastiche "Little by Little," a standout in terms of cool-eyed intensity.

Noteworthy for the first album appearance of "19th Nervous Breakdown" and the hit version of "Time Is on My Side," this first collection in a long line of Rolling Stones retrospectives collects the early singles of a band that was slowly and surely becoming the World's Greatest Rock & Roll Band.

The first in a series of three box-set collections, 1963-1965 pulls together the US and UK singles and EPs from the onset of the legendary band's recording career.