The Essential Collection (ABBA album)
2012 compilation album by ABBA
The Essential Collection is a 2012 compilation album released by Swedish pop group ABBA, collecting all single A-sides as originally planned and conceived by their record company, Polar Music, in addition to a few songs that were single hits in significant markets, as well as album tracks for which music videos were made. A two-CD set, the first disc spans 1972 to 1978 ("People Need Love" to "Summer Night City"), while the second covers 1979 to 1982 ("Chiquitita" to "Under Attack").
The Essential Collection effectively supersedes 2001's The Definitive Collection, retaining all but two tracks from the earlier release (eliminating the "Ring Ring" and "Voulez-Vous" remixes) and adding four others ("Bang-A-Boomerang", "That's Me", "One Man, One Woman" and "Happy New Year"). The sequencing is chronological, with "Thank You for the Music" moved from the second disc to the first. Unlike its predecessor, The Essential Collection does not feature regional bonus tracks.
The Essential Collection was also released in DVD format. It features every official ABBA music video plus five Spanish-language clips, two of which ("Conociéndome, conociéndote" and "Gracias por la música") did not appear on The Definitive Collection. It also includes the 2004 short film The Last Video.
The collection was released as a two-CD set, a DVD, and a three-disc set including the DVD and both CDs.
It was awarded a gold disc for 100,000 sales in Germany.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The Essential Collection (ABBA album)” as 2012 compilation album by ABBA. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 2012 compilation album by ABBA. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 4, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q121992027. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2012, 1972, 1978 and 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Essential Collection (ABBA album)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.