Slashdot Mirror
Death of the Album?
panth0r asks: "I know that a simple search for ' death of the album' will give you about 2000 finds of personal websites and their owner's opinions of what is to come of the music industry. Of course I can't resist the chance to ask Slashdot for their take on the issue, so here it is: Do you think the traditional music album is dying out because of advances in technology?"
Of course I can't resist the chance to ask Slashdot for their take on the issue, so here it is: Do you think the traditional music album is dying out because of advances in technology?
No.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Let my clarify the short answer from my first post. I think that thanks to technology, the album is better than ever. Today you can buy a cheap computer for professional music mastering, and publish your album even if only three people in the world will buy it (or even publish hundreds of albums, with a new album every two days, or... you get the idea). Is the vinyl dead? Of course not. CD is not going anywhere either.
(Sidenote: why on Earth has Slashcode started to change dashes to double hyphens?)
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
The idea of an album has become a conceptual structure. Each song tells part of a the story that an album represents. So no, I don't think the album is dead at all.
Actually, since the death of the CD longbox, albums have generally become something relegated to the past. It's no longer something that you buy to add to your collection, rather it is something that you consume and toss out when the latest fad washes away the fading memories of it.
The fact that most artists suck these days (Rush? Tool? These are good??) doesn't help the situation much, but it is more a symptom of the real problem which is that album covers and cases have become cheap plastic "jewel boxes" rather than the more permanent cardboard with intricate artwork on it.
Technology isn't the problem, it's marketing and distribution. Albums are sold on one or two songs because the advertising - radio, clips on MTV, even concerts in most cases - has given us a singles-driven marketplace in a market where singles, for the most part, are no longer available for purchase. How did Britney Spears become the youngest female artist to debut her first album at #1? Because they had been playing "Hit Me Baby One More Time" constantly for six months, but there was no way to purchase it. By the time the album dropped, the demand had built to such a point most people never clicked past the first couple of songs (at least not more than once).
Because the suits are only concerned with marketing, they don't care how crappy the rest of the album is as long as there are one or two decent singles. This has led to the decline of the album because most artists don't have the power - or even desire - to do anything better.
So no, technology hasn't done this. Sure, technology makes it easier to shuffle songs around and mix them to our own desires, but most of us desire to listen to the music in the way it was intended or that provides the most fufilling listening experience; in this age of flash marketing it's just that many artists don't produce albums that benefit from being played in order, in most cases much of the disc usually isn't worth playing at all.
I don't blame this on the fact that technology allows me flexibility to customize my listening experience, I blame it on the producers and record companies that don't give me a reason not to.
AE
the death of full recorded albums is not due to any new marketing trends, it's because by and large bands aren't making albums anymore. This will surely feed the flames, but I can't recall the last time I bought anything that flowed together as a single work, regardless of what track I was listening to. I recall things like Metallica's Black, Chili Pepper's Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Houses of the Holy, and I think of how much they were great albums. I scratch my head when I think of anything else I've bought that was recorded in the past ten years that was even close to that level of completeness.
Next question.
What is dying is singles. Just look at the sales figures; internet downloads (legal and illegal) are killing the CD single off bigtime. Not surprising when (to use UK figures) it is 3-4 pounds for the disc, with only 2 B-sides (usually remixes that few care about), or 79p for the track you actually want from iTunes (assuming you don't just copy it).
Meanwhile, everyone who wants actual physical product in their hands buys albums, which have come down significantly in price in recent years. Here in the UK, sales measured by number of actual discs sold are well up; it's only when the record companies are doing their "piracy is killing us, honest" that they go on about how they haven't seen a huge increase in sales by value.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
.. this will keep happening. This should be a warning!
If you go back even as far as the forties or fifties, you had a lot of groups that existed just to pound out singles and disappear. One-hit wonders aren't a new phenomenon.
Even in the sixties (the height of album-oriented rock), both albums and singles had their place. In 1967, the Beatles released the Sgt. Pepper's LP and "Strawberry Fields Forever" c/w "Penny Lane." Both formats have their strengths (and the Beatles certainly got the most out of both of them that year).
Last year, we had, to start, the Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat, the Arcade Fire's Funeral, and Green Day's American Idiot, so clearly album rock isn't a dead form yet.
I'm reminded of this review of (of all things) Vanessa Carlton's first album. Basically, he says that her single, "A Thousand Miles," was great, but that the record company is a bunch of bastards for trying to milk an entire (horrible) album out of her. He makes a good point that some people just have one good song in them, and that's that. Why not simply allow them to make their statement and get on with their lives?
I think that's what the trend of digital music will help accomplish. A lot of artists only have one good song. People just want that song instead of the entire album, and now there's an easy distribution method in place for that.
(Of course, this may not be the case either. Why are single sales so bad in the U.S., I wonder? I miss B-sides.)
But there are also a lot of artists who are full of great songs and, moreover, know how to use the album format to form a complete and coherent artistic statement (and don't listen to the cynics here who say all modern music is crap, there's still a ton of good stuff out there if you look for it). They'll continue to do so, like they have been through all the other format shifts. Record companies will continue to support this since they can sell albums at higher margins than they can sell individual songs, iTunes or not.
As an addendum, I hope that the era of physical media for music isn't over yet. There's something nice about getting something tangible for your money (not to mention you get the freedom of ripping it in the format of your choice, given that the disc isn't crippled with copy-protection crap). I think this will always exist, if only as an audiophile niche (maybe SACD has a future after all?).
2000 bloggers can't be wrong.
I still buy the original, full CDs.
Amazingly in this digital age, some of us still have CD players. I rip everything I buy - all my music is on my computer and I listen there or on my MP3 player. But I like to have the originals in a lossless, archivable physical format. Not to mention that I still have a CD changer in my car.
However - the second they start encoding the CDs I buy with "copy protection" that makes it impossible - or a hassle - to rip my CDs, that's probably when I'll switch to buying music online and do something like wiring up an iPod to my car. All DRM will do is kill the brick & mortar retailers.
because your average pop star releases a few decent (or at least good selling songs) and the rest of the album is just fillers. If your a fan of Enigma or Paul van Dyk who always sequence thier album or Dj Tiesto who usually mixes them you will see that the Album is far more than just a collection of songs. I often refuse to listen to snippets of an album like those and always listen to it in full
...but i don't hope so. It's often interesting to hear a song more then twice, and find out that its even better then those smash hit u hear everyday. its very difficult to find those gems if u are not forced to listen to them, cause u didn't buy thw whole album. but thats just my opinion.
With a youth culture that, for the most part, has been force fed their musical tastes so that they will buy what Viacom is pushing, I am not surprised that some are predicting the end of the album. Rant.end() I have learned that there is nothing better in the world than exploring my own musical tastes and have found the internet a blessing in this regard. If an album sucks except for one song it can't escape internet reviews.
If we use the term in the sense of a plastic disc with a bunch of songs....yes
If we use the term to capture a set of songs, that toghether form a story....no
We become so involved with the now, that we forget why we actually started doing things the way we do.
In the end...nothing but semantics!
...I don't buy music, I steal it.
I listen to a lot of electronic music and with some styles like drum & bass for instance, the album concept never really has been a big thing there. Tracks are released on 12" mostly.
With other genres though, many albums are a concept of music/art (rather than a bunch of songs randomly put together on a disk, slapped together in an appealing package). For artists there's usually a whole process of creating the album, and often there's a story told througout the songs on an album. I don't think this will change much with new technology.
Sample this!
However, digital media will probably create new ways of packaging music, that weren't practical during the vinyl/CD era. But the album will still exist.
At least for rock band (and such), it's a pretty natural way of working. You write material over a longer period of time and then you gather the band, select a number of songs to record and then you go into the recording studio and record them. Hopefully, when you're done you have a dozen or so recorded songs that are good enough to be released.
Of course, things are different for e.g. people doing electronical music, hip-hop etc. It's much more common for them to record a song once they've written it (for electronical music it's a very small step from writing a song to recording it). This means that they have a more or less continuous stream of basically finished recorded tracks.
Also, as recording equipment has gotten more affordable (mainly thanks to computers and other digital equipment), it's become more common for bands to record songs themselves, a few songs at a time -- instead of having to rent a studio (and usually a producer etc).
But anyway, I think bands will still be recording batches of songs, and each batch will reflect the mood, influences and experiences the band has gathered over a period of time etc. Basically what makes an album what it is.
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
I think a lot of this has to do with the ever-increasing media machine slowly giving everyone A.D.D. You can't watch television or listen to the radio without having your senses routinely assaulted. This makes it difficult to concentrate on any one thing, and as a result, the populace tends to get tired of products at a much faster pace, and has begun to expect instant replacements that are more exciting.
I think these things come and go in cycles. Right now we're in a depression when it comes to things like quality, social consciousness, creativity and the product forms that represent the latest advances in these areas. There are always exceptions, like the iPod which is compensating for the lack of good music by enabling new generations to discover older, better-crafted music. I see much of the new technology ending up exposing people to a more "golden age" of music/media where people subscribed to bands and albums instead of formulaic, over-produced singles.
Perhaps we'll see younger kids getting into more 60s music... that was about the last time an artist that could write an anti-war song and get any airplay. Maybe when corporate america sees the money they're losing by "playing it safe" with their "art" they might start giving interesting, inciteful artists a chance to share the spotlight with the current crop of plastic automatons.
I've read a couple of comments saying negative things about "the music of today" and such.
Stop!
Don't you understand that this is exactly what your parents thought of your music? And their parents before them? And so forth?
You're getting old, buddy.
Too old to just listen to the music.
Too old to enjoy music.
I'm not a big fan or R&B and rap, but once in a while a good track comes along and I will enjoy that track.
Wouldn't it be a shame of you would deprive yourself of the vast richness that is music, just because you don't want to keep an open mind to what is out there?
You're missing out on a lot of great music just because you're stuck to a nostalgic notion of what music should be like.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
As far as the listener is concerned, Napster tried to kill it, BitTorrent brought it back to life, and music stores are killing it again.
----- "All right. It was a miracle. Can we go now?"
Do you think the traditional music album is dying out because of advances in technology?
Nope. As long as artists that have something substantial to say exist, there will be albums.
If one's only source of new music is MTV and crap like that, one may think that the albums are a thing of the past. But, that's about the same as eating only in McDonald's and thinking that traditional gourmet cuisine is dying out.
Market for music is much, much bigger than Top40. In fact, if anything, advances in technology, enabling the Long Tail phenomenon (http://www.thelongtail.com/) will do just the opposite. When everyone can trivially access every bit of music ever recorded, albums will have a much easier time finding an audience.
Sure, some forms of music will never be strong on albums (dance, club oriented music), but again, they don't represent the majority of music out there.
What I'm talking about is the "music" that can be tested with that silly audio analysis program Slashdot had a story about several weeks ago.
But is the album dead? Of course not. To most artists, a single track by itself is only part of a whole, not a standalone work of art.
There's plenty of good music out there, you just have to look for it. Don't let them shove the top 40 down your throats.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
This is an endless circular argument. The "Death of the Album" has been talked about for the past fifteen years at least, and it doesn't happen.
Even if you look at Billboard's Top 200 chart you're going to see a lot of, well, albums.
If anything, I would imagine the re-birth of the album. As single tracks are easier to get and download (and not pay $7 for a CDS with four tracks), artists will focus on the album.
But we'll have the same mix we've always had. About twenty percent of good and great stuff, twenty percent of really awful stuff, and sixty percent of material that might have a good song or two but is ultimately forgettable.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
In my rather outdated way of thinking, I consider CDs and downloadable songs to be different from albums. I consider a real album to be an LP or two or four with a cardboard jacket that may or may not fold out. Those were definitely works of art, especially those from the psychadelic era, and you could spend hours looking at them even sober.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Take the view that an album is a record of artistic work from a period in time by one group of artists. That won't disappear easily. Even if the songs are produced one after the other and made available in online in small batches, there will be a collection at a later point (like a series box for a tv show).
But for sales-oriented radio-play music, where the album tracks are filler material and seen as unimportant, I can see the album disappearing because the investors in the b(r)and don't want to throw money away on unnecessary guff.
What about B-sides on singles? With people not buying (as many) hard copies, there is less need for such bonus material; equally, it can be this bonus material that adds to the package (as with a DVD set).
All things in life are cyclical. When I was a kid in the 60's and 70's, singles were king. There were a number of bands who had hit singles who had either no album or albums with abysmal sales. Radio stations needed singles as that's what they were set up to play. I have a bunch of singles not generally released, but for use by DJ's to promote an album. Along came the AOR (Album Oriented Rock) stations as the audience matured, and album sales picked up substantially. These stations might not have had more listeners than the singles stations, but they had substantially more young adult (read: high disposable income) listeners. They were profitable, and their standard setup was two cueing turntables set up for LP's. It was a pain to play a 45, so it didn't get done very often. Finally came the CD and the transition was complete.
Now we are coming back to the single. At the same time, I expect we'll start to see groups' entire collections released on a single disk (DVD or other). No amazing prediction here, as boxed sets have been a fairly lucrative sub-market for 10 or 15 years now.
As a piece of complete trivia, those boxed sets of CD's harken back to the original "albums" which were collections of 78's stored in what looked like a photo album, with paper sleeves instead of pages. 78's could only store roughly what a 1950's era 45 could, so a symphony, for example, came in an "album" of as many as 20 78's. The term ended up referring to any collection of music, even if it was on a single disk. But by now, I rarely hear anyone under twenty-five refer to an album, probably because they associate it with vinyl,not music collections...
It's possible that in 50 or 100 years that musicians and fans won't be listening to the Beatles, Frank Sinatra or even The Clash, etc. But if they are, they will certainly view the work of 20th century artists in terms of their "albums," in the same way we view Shakespeare's plays or Beethoven's symphonies as discrete works of art.
As for newer artists, even though the means exist now for them to do away with "albums", they still overwhelmingly choose to present their work that way. The reason for this is simply because they were influenced by earlier artists who made "albums," and want to do the same thing themselves.
Who uses vinyl anymore? (Braces himself for the barrage of attacks)
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
"Bands" that can't put on a decent live show aren't real bands anyway. If you can play live well, there will always be opportunities for you. recorded music is just going to become an advert for live performances.
Dance music is usually released by the producer as a single, but is most often consumed as a DJ mix. Not only are the songs selected and ordered to fit together and tell a story, the songs are actually blended together. If done well, it's difficult for non-DJs to tell when one song ends and the next one starts, exactly. To take a dozen records produced by different people around the world (after sifting through thousands of tracks to find the right ones) is a unique and difficult skill that non-fans fail to appreciate.
Well, I really can't generalize, so I'll just speak for my self.
" Do you think the traditional music album is dying out because of advances in technology?"
No. The traditional music album died the day I bought an album with only one song I liked on it. Advances in technology renewed my interest in music by making it more cost effective to me, but they're not responsible for my lack of interest in albums.
"Derp de derp."
I've bought a lot of stuff in the last ten years that has great album flow/unified-work appeal. I've also bought very little that was released by major labels, and instead get a lot of stuff from small bands on indy labels where they're driven by their own desire to produce great music, and aren't forced to do what some label exec thinks is going to sell.
A few of my recent favorites:
100 Watt Smile - two different albums, one called 100 Watt Smile, the other is "...and Reason Flew"
Gram Rabbit - Music to Start a Cult to.
Einstürzende Neubauten - all their albums are cohesive works and very different from one another. Amazing band.
Why not ask: SHOULD the album be dead? The march of technology produces new devides, formats and gadgetry while message boards, newspapers and water-cooler chats decry the death of one thing or another. Progress does not do this because it ceases to like the old; it simply produces improvements, and the ones which people at large decide represent something "better" survive and flourish.
I don't know much about music, but to me the arguments sound a lot like "is the floppy disk dead?" - well, arguably it is. Do any of us want it back? Game and application manufacturers used to be constrained by the storage capacity of disks, and often came up with ingenius optimizations (or were forced to leave out unnecessary frills) to do so. They don't have to do that any more. The value of the results of this I leave as an exercise to the reader, but I would still not go back to having floppies as my only option.
If musicians could tell a story with the selection of songs on the album as a whole, it was because their talent allowed them to find a means of expressing their thoughts which fit within the boundaries of the medium - an ~hourlong LP that you had to flip over halfway through. I bet those same artists can and will find entirely new means of expression to fit within the boundaries of today, and tomorrow.
You can still buy a spinning wheel if you want to process your own wool. The fact that the vast majority of people in this country prefer not to doesn't mean that we, as a society, have "lost" the spinning wheel.
Perfectly Normal Industries
Us radio/club DJ's and vinyl junkies and collectors are actually buying up tons of albums, IN VINYL FORMAT! (there still are some of us out there) We purists right now are keeping the demand for vinyl LP's (that means a full album for you youngins) higher than you might think. Turntables are outselling guitars 2 to 1 right now, (kind of sad I know) so there are a lot of LP's being bought up. The way things are going though, the analog turntable will soon be extinct and replaced by new digital technology. That technology already exists, but it really just can't match the sound, feel, smell or taste of that black circular gold. THE VINYL ALBUM ISN'T DEAD YET!
Why is a collection of songs in a single release called an 'album'?
Because before the long playing 33.3 rpm record the only way to make such a release was a collection of discrete 78 rpm records. The collection was packaged in a book, that looked much like a 'photo album'. These collections were grouped two ways, one in which the tracks were ordered with consectutive numbers on individual discs so they would be played in order on a record changer. The other grouping was for playing them on a manual player with the record being flipped over between selections.
Nearly anything Dream Theater has ever released falls into that description...
Their albums are always highly integrated with each song following off the previous one. Infact two of them are infact Rock opera where the entire album is infact a story. (Metropolis pt2, and 6 Degrees)...
Rush's last studio Album (Vapor Trails) was highly integrated, a sort of struge and rebirth thing, although admittedly the connection isn't entire understood unless you read Ghost Rider the Book that Neil peart wrote at the same time he was composing the album.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Why wouldn't the same have happened after the advent of the 45, or the cassette single, or the CDS?
Fans of bands will still buy their albums, just as they will go to their concerts, just as they always have.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Well, this has been an ongoing issue of some debate on my sites forums. We recently put up a poll asking out users what format they perfered their music in and amazingly enough over 50% said cd and only roughly 25% said mp3. While mp3's are becoming more popular I do not believe they will take main stream as much as cd's do. The one thing with cds is the physical media. With a physical media you have something that you can collect, archive, and display. While I dont believe mp3's and digital media will be the death of albums I do believe that digital media will open up quite a few doors for the future.
I refer you to the ongoing research article on the subject.
http://www.liquidgeneration.com/poptoons/britneys_ breasts.asp
It is anything but conclusive.
A collegue tole me he recently told his whining daughter that she sounded like, "a broken record." Her reply: "What's a record?"
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
The album isn't dead.
However, most people perceive it as dead because they focus solely on mainstream acts, where an album is merely a container for a few decent singles, the rest being filler (or even worse, covers).
If anything, the web helps spread the word about underground acts. Before webzines, you'd have to scour record shops looking for the last copies of good fanzines that'd promote new stuff based almost entirely on talent. In that arena, albums are generally well thought-out, loving affairs, since it costs a lot to press a record. Singles just don't come into it; except for the old "you're not good unless you release 7" singles" crowd, but there's no pleasing some people.
Can anybody tell me where to score a replacement stylus for my Stanton 681EEE?
Since I'm a 70s guy, I'm lucky. back then almost all songs were good on an album. Today? 1 maybe 2 good songs on an entire album. everything else is filler stuff. Record companies should keep up. Remember when 4-track tapes cost 10 bucks and CDs 20 bucks? a tape costs something to manufacture. there's a casing, a roll of tape, some springs and rollers. a CD is 1 cent of polycarbonate plastic molded on an aluminum sheet. Why are they still that expensive? I don't think the artist gets more than a buck on those. Producers are just getting greedier.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Right now, Pitckforkmedia.com is running a feature on its favorite albums from 2000-2004. Some good albums by more mainstream artists (e.g., The Strokes, Eminem) barely made the list. It doesn't like they had any trouble filling the list out to 100. Yet this would be the period I would expect to show evidence of this technologically-induced "death of an album" decline that is hypothesized.
The point isn't whether you agree with their list. No single person does, and arguing about it and the various banalities of each album is part of the fun. There's lots of great albums out there, some of it less mainstream than others but with a little help from your buddy technology, it's easy to find. Pitckfork and ITMS are excellent examples of this. But I do agree with others that this certainly dependent on what type of music you're interested in.
Technology isn't to blame for whatever perceived decline of an album there may be: radio is. Nearly a decade ago, I remember mainstream stations that would play album tracks (i.e., not just the singles) regularly, just to be different. Not so anymore. Whenever I go back to Denver (a ClearChannel hotspot), I'm always increasingly shocked at how stale everything sounds. Brand new? I first heard this a year ago!
P.S. The solution to bad radio is easy: www.kexp.org.
hands down.
- Queens of the Stone Age: Songs for the Deaf
- Blue Man Group: The Complex
- Poe: Haunted
- Nine Inch Nails: The Fragile
- Smashing Pumpkins: Siamese Dream
- 3 Doors Down: The Better Life
- Depeche Mode: Violator
- Godsmack: Godsmack
- Green Day: American Idiot
- Hole: Celebrity Skin
- Marylin Manson: Mechanical Animals
- Orgy: Candyass
- The Toadies: Rubberneck
- U2: Achtung Baby
- Velvet Revolver: Contraband
- Stone Temple Pilots: Core
- Puddle of Mudd: Come Clean
I should mention that any Green Day album is good, if you happen to like their music. They never really pandered to the whole success thing. All Nine Inch Nails albums have recurring musical themes throughout, although The Fragile is probably the weakest of the bunch in "popularity", as it's more tame. I also happen to like all of Marilyn Manson's CDs since Mechanical Animals, but as a single piece of work, they may or may not meet your definition.I have yet to get Muse, they sound interesting. The upcoming new Queens of the Stone Age disk may be promising. There's also some almost unknown current acts like Concrete Blonde, whose albums may not be "great", but who generally fall into the "full album" category and are still releasing albums about every 2 years.
What I've noticed is that some bands, esp new ones, will have 1 hyped song on the radio, and then fade, but their album may actually have good material on them. Others, those tending towards "pop" usually suck. You have to love P2P for allowing you to determine which are which. I bought several thanks to hearing the rest of their music, as radio royally sucks these days. Friends also help, introducing you to wider music provided your friends tastes diverge from yours. BTW, I own about 500 CDs, so I have a bit of a collection. My average price runs about $7.50/CD new, so I'm surely not paying the usurious fees the RIAA wants you to pay. ;)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Check out rising stars The Mars Volta for instance http://www.themarsvolta.com/.
Listen to stuff on CD Baby like Cire http://www.cire.tv/,
Lecivius http://www.lecivius.com/
and Ahleuchatistas http://www.ahleuchatistas.com/.
Wait and see what Tool and Nine Inch Nails come out with this year. Adrian Belew's new Record is supposedly kickass (if you can find it). For every shitty project that is based on greed, it makes the true artists, those who create from their boundless hearts not their unsustainable wallets. Great art comes from pain, those poor guys at the fringes will blow your mind if you just give them a chance and the established artists that are still driven by the right mechanisms will comtinue to top themselves. Jesse AKA Tablebeast
These days cds cost almost nothing to produce and can be made in very low series (you could even order just a couple of hundred from the factory).
There will always be a niche market for full alumbs with nice, unique booklets whatever happens. Probably the same people that now buy vinyl will later by cds.
THE way to get music these days is "download containging folder", or, wich is the same, get the album ...
Have you considered applications such as ourTunes, which allow a user to download an entire library of music on something such as a campus connection in a matter of seconds. Most likely people using this application are not downloading single songs, but entire albums.
Oh fuck...oh...FUCK...this hurts...I won't be able to sleep because of this stupid fuck...oh, it's so fucking dumb I can't even repeat the shit...oh ouch...