"A Collection of Beatles Oldies... but Goldies" was the first official compilation Beatles LP. It was released in December, 1966 purely to fulfill their current EMI contract which stipulated that the group had to release a minimum of two albums a year. The only album they had released in 1966 was Revolver, and by the time that they were due to release a second one they had started work on the Sgt. Peppers LP that was, at the time, nowhere near completion. So George Martin went around and found a collection of Beatle songs that had, until then, never appeared on a Beatles album. They were a collection of songs that had only appeared on singles. He also included the song 'Bad Boy', a number that was originally recorded exclusively for the American market and featured on the 'Beatles VI' Capitol LP. This was the first Beatles LP not to reach number 1 which is hardly surprising. Revolver was still selling very well and all but one of the songs had already been released and bought by all the Beatle fans. Only one song on the album was new, but that was hardly enough reason to buy an entire album.

Mistakes always happen during the production of a record, and recording history is full of famous examples where particular tracks were accidentally added or left off, or a cover was printed incorrectly. This album is no exception. It appears that early on during production a batch of Side 2 labels got contaminated with some stray Side 1 labels. This resulted in the novelty of side 1 labels appearing on both sides of the label. Because this would make the track-listing of side 2 impossible to know without either listening to it or looking at the cover such an error should have been picked up by quality control and disposed of (or maybe having another label adhered on top of it). However, because this was the Beatles and demand was high for the Christmas season, perhaps such a trivial error may have been passed anyway to save money.

It's uncertain, but such errors today are near-impossible to find, especially on a Beatles record.