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?"
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.
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
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?"
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?).
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?
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