Singles, Not Albums, Define Music Industry Success

athloi writes "Despite the tough times for albums, the music industry is slowly but surely learning the most important lesson of all: give consumers what they want, and they happily open their wallets. Digital music sales are a new business and a new way of thinking about and interacting with content. The industry should be paying closer attention to its meteoric rise and less attention to the dying, arcane album. It should absolutely drop the rhetoric about how piracy is destroying the business, because the sea change in sales patterns shows that something else is is afoot. It means that when users are sitting at a computer and looking for music, more and more each year are turning to legal download services."

Comments

I was worried about this

[prockcore]

I like albums.

Singles exist to catch your attention.. the same way commercials are loud and obnoxious. If there isn't the rest of the album, then the only music will be loud and obnoxious "LISTEN TO ME" stuff. The more subtle music will be sacrificed because it doesn't present well on the radio.

Re:I was worried about this

[dolphinling]

I definitely agree. The vast majority of the music I own is from independent labels, and most of it I often listen to an album at a time. I understand that certain formats (where you don't have the listener's attention for long) work better for singles, but music that's meant to be good, and meant to be really listened to, still can and does work better as an album.

Re:I was worried about this

[WilliamSChips]

And that's why Radiohead is failing.

Re:I was worried about this

[BoberFett]

I like albums too. At the same time I realize that most popular "musicians" don't have the ability to create them. There are some excellent musicians who can create a dozen tracks covering 45 or more minutes which form a cohesive message or story. That's a small minority though. Most of the pop bands of today release a CD with a handful singles that are no way relevant to one another, and only two of which are good enough to bother listening to.

High quality artists can continue to create albums. One hit wonders should know their place in the world:

1. Accept the fact that most of their music isn't that good
2. Learn to be grateful that they had one hit song
3. Invest some of the income from their hit single instead of blowing the whole thing on drugs and hookers

Re:I was worried about this

[christurkel]

The gist is, albums will always have a role to play in music, digital age or not, it's just singles will become the dominant form. Think of it this way: AC/DC, Bob Seger, etc, will always put albums worth buying but now you'll be saved from whole albums of Britney Spears and Ashlee Simpson.

Re:I was worried about this

[notamisfit]

Singles have always been the dominant form; it's just that the record industry hasn't found a way to cater to that market since the 45 RPM record bit the dust.

Re:I was worried about this

[SimonInOz]

>> There are some excellent musicians who can create a dozen tracks covering 45 or more minutes which form a cohesive message or story.

Hm, let me think. Pink Floyd. The Moody Blues. Alan Parsons Project. Emerson Lake and Palmer.
Ok, so I'm showing my age.

But BoberFett has a point.

Mind you,

>> Invest some of the income from their hit single instead of blowing the whole thing on drugs and hookers

is a bit rich. Most bands seem to actually lose money from making albums after the music companies have their claws into them.
It puzzles me, I admit, why start-up bands - the pub circuit - don't simply publish their songs online as MP3s and let their fans do the markets. If they become success, they could either start charging for concerts (and offer MP3s of those to concert attendees). And never get nailed by the music companies. (Damn, they must have a good line of chat. "Hey, sign here. We will take possession of everything you ever create, we will sell it, make a fortune and charge you for the privilege. If you become a top 10 band you might start to make some money in about 3-4 years if you nearly kill yourselves and get very very lucky. Otherwise we will drive you broke" - "Sure, where do I sign?").

Re:I was worried about this

[PopeRatzo]

I had always been an album guy. Growing up with the great works of rock, which were all presented as albums, made me especially appreciative of the album form.

But since my most regular periods of music listening are my 1 hour bicycle trips to and from my office every day, and I listen to music on portable mp3 players, I'd come to like the "shuffle" format for the uncertainty and surprise it brought to my listening.

However, in the past several weeks, I've taken my player off of "shuffle" and have been listening to albums all the way through. It started when someone gave me a few albums that I've really come to enjoy (Apples in Stereo, in case you're interested, and others). So for nearly a month now, all I do is listen to albums all the way through on my way to the office and back home. The Man Who Sold the World, Icky Thump, Coltrane's Ballads, even The Stooges. I'd forgotten just how good great albums can be.

I'm betting the popularity of albums will return as the corporate music industry dries up and blows away and musical artists make more direct contact with their fans through direct marketing of their music via the web.

Re:I was worried about this

[binarybum]

I agree, but welcome to the modern pop music movement. More and more is just "loud and obnoxious" and "artists" (you know who I'm talking about, and why I'm using quotes) are striving to produce albums that are strings of loud obnoxious crud. Your fears might be justified, but what might happen is that the folks that insist on making real quality music (genuine artists will always exist) may get marginalized by the loud and obnoxious pay-4-singles market to the point where they have to nearly give the stuff away. Perhaps not so hot for them, but a boon for those not brain-washed by the loud and obnoxious market. While I certainly wouldn't say so in front of my artist friends, maybe the starving artist model of yore ain't such a terrible thing in light of the big existential picture - I at least prefer it to the disgustingly rich and egotistical model we've got going now. Consider music on NPR or public radio vs. music on commercial radio. IMHO it tends to be much denser in terms of quality, and the music being played often does not have the big price-tag that commercial radio has. All and all, I think we (and more importantly the recording industry) need to recognize that the current model is broken; let's welcome and promote change and the accessibility of truly good (whatever that may be to any individual) music. I really do trust that the market will take us somewhere better with this one if only the RIAA will open their arcane, restrictive floodgates.

Re:I was worried about this

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

That's one way of looking at things, and certainly I would agree with your sentiment that it would be a terrible thing if that's the way things end up. But I disagree that albums, or at least "album songs" will disappear. As long as there are people like me and you, and I believe there are an awful lot of us, who continue to want and to buy the non-single stuff then there will always be people willing to produce it. Simple supply and demand.

To my mind the only thing digital content and the death of the album as a solid chunk of inseparable songs will do is remove the crap. The stuff that nobody would buy if it was left to stand on it's own two feet. By eliminating the album you're forcing each song to be good because there's no longer any way to force shit on people just because it comes on a plastic disc which contains a couple of other songs that are good. No more albums means no more filler.

We're finally in a situation where we can vote with our wallets on each individual song. If good songs get left by the wayside for generic attention-grabbing crap we'll have only ourselves to blame

Re:I was worried about this

[deep_creek]

I'm an album fan myself. Sad though I can't recall buying one in recent history where all the songs were good. Actually, I have not purchased a new album in several years because of this fact. I got tired of getting burned by the record company putting maybe (if very lucky) two good songs on an album with the rest being absolute crap. I have a whole stack of them I can't even pawn-off on eBay for a penny. Crazy that one has to compile about 4 or 5 of a band's CD's just to have enough good songs to constitute an album. That is one of the many reasons the music industry no longer gets my money. Something else that is sad, but humorous is say a modern band has released 4 albums and at another attempt at a money grab, they release a "best of"... which they can't even fill with enough songs and have to include new ones. Remember when being in a band meant having to also be a musician? Or when the guy holding the guitar knew, well... how to actually play it? Oh yes, and being a lead singer meant being able to carry a note other than the now standard pre-pubescent whine? I'm not even going to start on about the lyrics now days... Enough with my rant. :)

Re:I was worried about this

[Anonymous Coward]

"3. Invest some of the income from their hit single instead of blowing the whole thing on drugs and hookers"

if you read the fine print for the job description, both drugs and hookers/groupies are mandatory, whilst being the financial responsibility of the respective rockstar.
take into account just how many rod stewarts there would be assulting our sensibilities gyrating a sagging arse on some old-folks tour if it weren't for the attrition caused by drugs.
would it really be good to see jimi hendrix live in 2007, a man in his 60's behaving like a sexed up teen rock-god, or just sad?
i'm not condoning drug use, but if you wanna rock, burn bright, not long.

Re:I was worried about this

[nine-times]

I might be way in the minority, but I usually won't buy or keep single songs. It gets too hard to find while sorting through my entire music collection. I don't always like playing through my collection, and I don't like sorting through and finding individual songs that I like. If I have 5,000 to 10,000 songs in your collection, each by a different artist and on different albums, it overloads me a little when I try to decide what I want to listen to. It's much easier to decide, "I'm in the mood for some Bob Dylan" and have several albums worth to shuffle through.

Also, I've mad tons of instances where I bought an album because I liked two songs, only to find that my favorite song on an album was a third that I'd never heard before. It'd just be nice if more bands could craft coherent albums with consistently good songs.

Re:I was worried about this

[Stormx2]

A generalisation, good sir. I too have a general dislike of produced-for-tv singles, and most of my favourite albums follow themes / are concept albums. However, length != quality. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club falls under your 45 minute mark, and if you look at a lot of beatlesesque indie pop, some albums fall well under 30 minutes, but can be fantastic.

Still doesn't beat out tool, thought ;)

Re:I was worried about this

[croddy]

Except when it works better as an EP.

Re:I was worried about this

[davester666]

Singles exist to catch your attention.. the same way commercials are loud and obnoxious. If there isn't the rest of the album, then the only music will be loud and obnoxious "LISTEN TO ME" stuff. The more subtle music will be sacrificed because it doesn't present well on the radio.

I like albums too. Unfortunately, it seems the music industry [by that, I mean the big 4 labels] is driven entirely by maximizing profit as quickly as possible. To me, it seems that they just are just driven to get the 'single' for an album done and polished really good, so they can push it via Radio, and not let the artists spend as much time polishing the rest of the songs on the album.

Unfortunately, music piracy via the internet hit about when people got tired of buying the pablum the music industry was selling, and the industry believes that piracy is the primary reason that sales are down, instead of the more plausible reason [occam's razor :-) ] that they are selling something we aren't interested in buying.

I can't imagine the situation getting any better with Universal trying to shoot themselves in the foot screwing up internet sales [the only part of the industry currently growing] by trying to jerk Apple around in an effort to jack up the price for their latest one-hit wonder.

Ameria is still ruled by the 'get rich quick' mentality, moreso than other cultures [IMHO].

Re:I was worried about this

[coaxial]

AC/DC, Bob Seger, etc, will always put albums worth buying but now you'll be saved from whole albums of Britney Spears and Ashlee Simpson. AC/DC? Bob Seger?

Oh! You were being sarcastic! ;)

Re:I was worried about this

[tknd]

I don't see albums going away. This should only make the "album" more worthy. In the past you could just throw together a bunch of songs, and maybe one or two of them were actually worth something. As a consumer this model sucked: you felt 2 songs were worth the money yet if you wanted them, you had to pay up the entire cost of the album.

Now they can't do that anymore. If they want to sell an album, every song on the album better be worth it. The people who will benefit now are the listeners/consumers and the musicians that actually have song writing proficiency. The people who will lose out on this model are the one-hit wonders. In my opinion, that simple change will improve the quality of music by quite a bit as it's no longer easy to get away with selling crap.

Re:I was worried about this

[syousef]

Artists in general and musicians in particular don't get well known because they're able to plan sensibly for the future. They make it in the highly glamorized industry because they're rebellious and spontaneous and live the wild kind of life a teenager wishes they could or at least fantasizes about (you know the whole drugs and hookers, not to mention touring the world and being adored by millions). Sadly many people who are creative are also a tad mentally unstable. The industry doesn't promote common sense and if it did teens would move on to something else.

Asking these artists to create sensible investment plans and be grateful for their one song (by the way one song will generally get you into debt not make you rich) isn't very differen to asking drug addicts and hookers to go to church and quit doing what they do.

Re:I was worried about this

[coaxial]

I'm sorry, but the concept album was always horrible self-absorbed exercise from the 70s. Yes, they still exist, but they're rarely any good. The good concepts albums are simply nominal concept albums. If you bash your audience over the head, you suck as a writer. Albums are portfolios. They represent a body of work at a period of time. Even on the fabled concept album, there's rarely any more than three stand out songs.

Good writers make good songs. The idea that they should sit on them until they get 12 others that might kinda sort of have a almost convincing story connecting them is dumb.

The problem isn't that the albums aren't concept albums, it's that most writers can't write lyrics. There's a lot of bands that I like. I like the music. The songs are cool, but I found it often helps not to actively listen to the lyrics. There's almost always a bit sophmoric. In the worst case, the lyrics reek of "moving units in the 13-20 year old demographic."

Re:I was worried about this

[timmarhy]

I like music, not albums or singles. all an album is, is a collection of music, and if there's only 1 song on there worth listening to, why the fuck would i want to pay for all the other "filler". This is why albums are dieing. In times past for a track to make it onto an album it had to be good, now it just has to be filler.

Re:I was worried about this

[Eskarel]

I like albums too, and I think they should and will continue to be made.

What this is about is choice, both for the artist and for the consumer. It hopefully means no more albums where there are 3 good songs and the rest are filler. Albums where the whole album is good will remain, but artists will no longer be locked into producing 45 minutes of music in order to be successful and consumers will no longer have to pay for the filler if they do.

Re:I was worried about this

[wall0159]

And the great thing about albums by AC/DC is that you only need to buy one! /ducks

Re:I was worried about this

[spoco2]

He wasn't talking about the 'concept' album, we're not talking a Sgt Peppers, or Dark Side of the Moon here (although we could be just as well)... what we're talking about is a collection of songs that you can listen to together, one after the other and they all 'fit' together.

They don't have to have a cohesive story, they don't have to 'be a part' of some larger vision, but they work when played together, and the listener is rewarded from listening to all the tracks on an album, not just the singles.

Really, some of my favourite tracks have never been released as singles, and I'd have never known about them if I didn't buy entire albums.

Re:I was worried about this

[Seumas]

On the flip side, the rest of an album is often crappy fluff to round out the contract obligation and completely sucks. Even musicians who will never chart or don't even have a label are going to have some good songs and some songs that are total ass. Why should I pay for those songs? Also, who cars about singles? Talking about "singles" indicates we're talking mostly about radio-play music and who the hell actually listens to that drivel? They can do whatever they want with their singles, because it doesn't mean anything to the rest of the world. Your comment about more subtle music being sacrificed because it doesn't present well on the radio is irrelevant now. That would have been a great point to make twenty years ago. Radio isn't about to become crap. It is crap. It has been crap for a very long time. The idea that only a couple songs (if that) get off a record and spin frequently enough on the radio to sell is about as new as payola.

Not to mention, your statement ignores the fact that MOST musicians and their music never make it onto the radio, so there's no point in them making a bunch of air-play friendly singles crap. The only people who need to do that are the select few that the labels are sending to the radio stations for air play and promotion. It has been that way for quite awhile. The only thing you have to be concerned with is Vitamin C or Eminem ruining their own albums in an attempt to produce nothing but singles... and... well... who cares about them?

More interesting to me is that I heard Fox News report last night (and quite ignorantly) that "There are 20 BILLION songs illegally downloaded every year, so the music industry is losing $20 BILLION in revenue per year!".

The ability to rip CDs to your computer and digital music downloads have both been around long enough now that the music industry is starting to feel the painful effect of losing out on the extra cash that having to re-buy songs constantly used to bring them. They used to be able to keep publishing the same catalog from a year ago, a decade ago and fifty years ago. They would sell plenty of this, because people would need to re-build their library in the new format. Or replace a stolen collection. Or replace scratched or lost albums and discs. - Today? Just pull them off of your system backup. And no need to re-buy in a new format. I still have it in MP3 or OGG, thanks.

Re:I was worried about this

[dinther]

You are so right! I like to add to that the fact that albums are also a great trick to sell you the same songs over and over as they occur in different combinations on the albums.

Re:I was worried about this

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Roxy Music's Avalon is a good example.

It's not a concept album, but I can't imagine listening to the songs out of context with the rest of the album. It all fits together so perfectly.

Re:I was worried about this

[glwtta]

Albums are portfolios. They represent a body of work at a period of time.

So, I don't think anyone was really talking about concept albums in particular (they are, after all, a tiny minority), but I think the point of an album is to be a little more cohesive than you describe. A good album does hang together pretty well, both musically and thematically, and has a sensible progression, even if there is no "story" behind it (doesn't have to be as structured as, let's say, "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven", but you also couldn't put "Ghost Reveries" on shuffle and get the same effect out of it). You can't just grab the last 12 songs you wrote, arrange them alphabetically, and call that an album.

Not that I don't enjoy actual concept albums ("Gothic Kabbalah" and "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" come to mind).

the lyrics reek of "moving units in the 13-20 year old demographic."

I was just thinking that Moving Units would be a great name for a band - turns out it already is.

Re:I was worried about this

[The_Wilschon]

As long as they are different recordings, I'm happy. My best friend, for instance, has the entirety of Led Zeppelin's released material, and it includes (IIRC) some 6 different versions of "Communication Breakdown". If you played the first ten seconds of all of them, you'd never know they were the same song, as Led Zeppelin improvised and rewrote constantly and endlessly. And that's not to say that the rest of each recording after 10 seconds is identical to the others, but at some point, you get at least some of the same musical themes, and some of the same lyrics, so you'd be able to guess that they were the same song.

Re:I was worried about this

[gordgekko]

> Ameria is still ruled by the 'get rich quick' mentality, moreso than other cultures [IMHO].

No, America is merely the best at it. *Everyone* wants to get quick rich.

Re:I was worried about this

[Lumpy]

Ok a list of more modern bands doing that...

Modest Mouse, Cake, RadioHead, Chemical brothers, System of a down, The slightly older Uncle Tupelo and the newer Son Volt and Wilco just to name a tiny few that have epic releases of incredible albums. I can name quite a few more if I actually look into the 180 gigs of mp3's or go into the CD vault downstairs. The Crap that is played on the top 40, the Emo-40, the goth-40, and the moody-40 stations are in fact pretty much solid crap without a hope of getting past their 1-2 hits. (One hit wonders was coined back in the 50's and it's always been a fact of the current music trends.)

What is happening today in music is not new, different or special. it has ALWAYS been that way. in the 50-s to the 80's we had singles and they outsold albums. The record companies desperately wanted singles to go away as they had lower profits so they started this shove albums down your throat technique. Now they act like it's always been that way.

Re:I was worried about this

[r_jensen11]

I like albums too. At the same time I realize that most popular "musicians" don't have the ability to create them

That's because they're, as you have said, "musicians." Generally, they're not artists. They're performers. Granted, there are notable exceptions like Radiohead, Prince, and the like, but for people like Justin Timberlake and Brittney Spears, I refuse to call the latter two "artists" because they have demonstrated no artistic creativity nor ability. Hell, they don't even come up with their own dance routines.

Re:I was worried about this

[Anonymous Coward]

An Album doesn't have to be a concept album to be good, it just doesn't need to be full of filler shit.

If you write a song that is only okay, or barely passable, don't release it. Or just offer it as free mp3.

Re:I was worried about this

[Anonymous Coward]

If an artist can't put together an entire album of songs worth listening to, then they're not worth listening to in the first place. That's why i have never bought a single in my life.

My wife, on the other hand has a shelf full of One Hit Wonders of the 80's Volume 2 type crap

Re:I was worried about this

[Admiral Ag]

Not to say that your friend isn't a unique individual, but every Led Zeppelin fan I know, including myself, has everything they ever put out.

And six versions of Communication Breakdown is definitely not enough.

Re:I was worried about this

[Lobster Quadrille]

I personally prefer albums over singles, but the musicians I listen to are very good at putting out a lot of music that doesn't suck. It may be fortunate that my music of choice is punk, and frankly, it's not hard to write good punk, but there are a lot of very talented musicians who crank out albums like crazy.

Bad Religion, NoFX, Pennywise, Pulley, Lagwagon, Rancid, Frenzal Rhomb, and hundreds more, all amazing musicians, all consistently putting out excellent albums, chock full of excellent music. None of it gets played on the radio, and I consider it a Good Thing.

It also helps that most of the bands I enjoy actively promote the sharing of their music. It's nice to see people with original ideas.

Re:I was worried about this

[I'm Don Giovanni]

But what do you define as "filler"? Simply stuff that wasn't "good" enough to be released as a single? There are many many songs that wouldn't "stand on their own" because they don't fit the "single" criteria (i.e. immediate mass appeal) but are great songs nonetheless.

And even so-called "filler" - I've bought albums that had songs that I initially dismissed as filler, but over time grew to like them more than the singles themselves. Your scenario eliminates such songs and such possibilities. Eliminating formulaic crap is one thing, eliminating any and all songs that wouldn't stand on their own as singles is going way too far.

Re:I was worried about this

[Kapsar]

Has any one else noticed that there has been an increase in Vinyl sales? I know i have bought more records than anything else. In those i often get a copy of the album digitally, for the new stuff anyway. Then i just go and download the record i own. I figure it fair use then. I could take the time to copy it onto my computer, but why bother? Sure i might miss some stuff, but i get most of it for my iPod.

Re:I was worried about this

[coredog64]

Still doesn't beat out tool, thought ;)

How can it when each track on a Tool album is 45 minutes long? ;)

Re:I was worried about this

[coredog64]

The problem isn't that the albums aren't concept albums, it's that most writers can't write lyrics. This isn't a problem for country musicians. George Strait, for example, writes very few of his own songs but still manages to make all the songs from disparate writers "his own".

Re:I was worried about this

[Anonymous Coward]

so...

4. ???
5. Profit!

Something tells me ??? is something like a stolen sex video or something.

Re:I was worried about this

[rejecting]

Radiohead did have a hit single in the mid 90's. You might have heard of it.

You're so very speeeeeeeeeecialllll........
I wish i was speeeeeeeeciallll.....

I'd go ahead and guess the reason radiohead could have such a prolific musical carrier is because the popularity of, you guessed it, that single.

Re:I was worried about this

[wild_berry]

This discussion is about albums vs. singles. Radiohead make great albums which contain good standalone songs. Go to your music download service and try out Pablo Honey/i>, The Bends and OK Computer. Look out for the dry sarcastic humour in all three.

Re:I was worried about this

[Nefarious Wheel]

Have a look at what Abba did with their fame and fortune -- they had a sensible investment plan, and ended up fabulously wealthy. Possibly the most successful (in terms of wealth generated) indie band ever (check it out -- they managed the whole publishing effort themselves, along sound business principles). They certainly didn't fit the wreck-the-hotel image, they just made good popular music that had broad appeal, and they were sensible about how they ran their business.

Re:I was worried about this

[sqldr]

I'm sorry, but the concept album was always horrible self-absorbed exercise from the 70s. Yes, they still exist, but they're rarely any good.

<sarcasm>Oh ok, thanks for the advice. I'll stop listening to them! </sarcasm>

This is like saying "I'm sorry, but feature films were always horrible self-absorbed exercise from the 70s. 10 minute TV shows are much better!

There are people on this forum who DO like that genre of music and don't like yours. It may not be your problem if the album is in demise, but your personal taste in music (or in fact, anyones) is completely, utterly irrelevant.

Re:I was worried about this

[MonoSynth]

indeed. I hate it when bands just have nine good new songs but cram six more fillers on the album to make it 45+ minutes instead of less than 30 minutes, just to make it look like a 'real' album instead of an EP.

Re:I was worried about this

[giorgiofr]

+5 Opeth reference :)

Re:I was worried about this

[giorgiofr]

Well they're not musicians either. They are strictly perfomers, and very good ones at that, judging from their success. But real musicians can and do put together well-organized albums that work like a single piece of art, rather than a collection of songs that happened to be written in a given time span.

Re:I was worried about this

[KoldKompress]

For a great concept band and album, listen to Armor for Sleep, especially their "What to do when you are Dead" album. It's a concept album, with 12 songs, starting with a mans suicide. Then each song after that travels through his experiance of his death, and what brought him upto that moment. It's a really fantastic concept album, that unravels with each track. It also uses the "5 stages of grief" model, with denial, anger, bargaining etc.

It's the best new concept album I've heard, and it's a fantastic story.

Re:I was worried about this

[MonoSynth]

and then there's Sufjan Stevens who manages to release an album with 72 minutes of pure goodness and another album with 75 minutes of outtakes from the recording sessions, just as great as the original album.

But those are exceptions. Most record labels won't even allow their artists to release an album full of good tracks, because 12 good songs means 3 albums with 4 good songs and a load of crappy album-fillers.

Re:I was worried about this

[coaxial]

It's not a genre of music. It's a genre of album if anything.

Johny Cash is an icon and one of my favorite performers of all time, but America sucks. It beats you over the head. Nine Inch Nails' Downward Spiral is a great album, and it has been called a "concept album," but it doesn't beat you over the head and so it works. As I said, if you're beating people over the head with your "message," you suck as a writer.

The stereotypical concept album was an artifact of 1970s hallucinogens and progressive rock. 20 minute songs deserved to die.

Re:I was worried about this

[sqldr]

20 minute songs [allmusic.com] deserved to die.

They didn't die. Only last month I bought the latest porcupine tree album, and the central song on it is 17 minutes. This didn't stop it getting great reviews, or selling extremely well.

Here's one review.

If you don't like progressive rock, then the only thing we've established is that you're not qualified to review any of it. People still like the stuff, and I'm afraid you're just going to have to accept that.

Re:I was worried about this

[dintech]

If there isn't the rest of the album, then the only music will be loud and obnoxious "LISTEN TO ME" stuff.

I agree that albums are a good thing but I don't agree with the rest of your point. A lot of people just aren't attracted to 'commercial' music in any sense and don't listen to the radio anyway. Probably because pop music these days is already '"LISTEN TO ME" stuff' so that horse has sailed.

Re:I was worried about this

[AP31R0N]

Meh. Most albums have 3 or so good tracks and then the rest is filler so they can push and album out the door. The album is obsolete as a unit of sale. If there are songs that are related to each other or are part of a concept (Abraxis), fine release them together. But don't hold bands hostage in a recording studio to make crap no one wanted. Do this instead. Release songs, don't worry about the charts. Every 15 or so songs, release a compilation. Call it an album if we must be so sentimental. Singles can be subtle. No really. It's true. If bands and labels would worry less about selling tracks and more about making stuff they want to make, people will either buy or not. Pulling emphasis FROM singles charts to touring and making music, the money will follow. i'd much rather get a steady stream of new material that had a high signal to noise ratio, than wait 2 years for 3 tracks i like and 12 that i skip.

Re:I was worried about this

[sabre307]

You're dead on! Most people don't quite get that a well made album is art as a whole, and not a bunch of independent parts. Take "Tommy" from "The Who", or "Operation: Mindcrime" from "Queensryche", they were actually rock operas that told a story if you listened to the entire album, but if you listen to one song out of context, it makes no sense.

Btw, shouldn't you're sig be "There are 10 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't."?

Re:I was worried about this

[hey!]

One theory of mine is that there is a very long period pendulum swinging here.

In the Baroque period, aristocratic patrons paid composers to create a soundtrack to various ceremonies: entering a banquet to sit down, going to prayers, or privately performed ballets with the patron and his set as the dancers.

By the end of the 1800s, this had been replaced by a middle class phenomenon: the concert hall performance with paying patrons. Like many middle class practices, there was a hefty element of self-improvement involved. Concerts were both entertainment and education. Like a lecture, a concert demands sustained attention.

What is an album, but a recorded concert? What is an iPod stuffed full of singles, but a background soundtrack for the owner's life?

Now the problem with my pendulum theory is that this doesn't have to be an either/or. People could spend most of their waking lives with earbuds wedged in their ears, and still attend concerts, either in person or in the form of an album. You don't listen to an album the same way as to a playlist.

People don't really have an entertainment budget; they buy the entertainment that appeals to them. And for whatever reason, longer forms that require extended attention do not appeal to them as much as music that they don't really pay much attention to at all.

The relevant budget may involve time, not money.

It's simplistic to say people don't have any attention span left. It amazes me that they follow very long and complex television shows, particularly if there is an element of competition in them: e.g., Survivor or American Idol.

TV has sucked the vitality out of so much of the rest of culture, whether it is political discourse or long forms of popular music, because it has sucked the reservoir of available attention dry.

Re:I was worried about this

[Urza9814]

I agree. With a lot of the music I listen to, you can't really separate a song from the album. The album as a whole tells a story. The songs aren't continuous, and you can certainly listen to a single song, but you need the album to at least know what's going on.
And I just generally prefer listening to albums. My music varies far too much to put together a playlist of random songs, even from one artist, unless that playlist is the album as they intended. Otherwise your emotions get jerked around with each song change and you feel like you're friggin bipolar. lol.

Of course, if you listen to the latest popular music, I can see why you wouldn't want more than one track of that garbage.

Re:I was worried about this

[MrNemesis]

Most people I know, myself included, who like Radiohead do it because their albums are paragons of what an album should be. I'm another of these people that thinks OK Computer is probably the finest album ever made - as a bunch of singles it's so-so, but listening to the album is like reading a Neal Stephenson book with a good ending :)

The people who bought Creep after ending u shouting at the top of their voice whilst in a drunken clinch and didn't like the res of their stuff aren't really Radiohead fans; they're a fan of that Radiohead single.

Not that I'm slagging off singles either; they have their place.

And there are still plenty of (admittedly more leftfield) artists producing "album" albums. Boards of Canada being one of my current favourites, despite being entirely instrumental/sample driven.

Re:I was worried about this

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't like progressive rock
 
Shhh, don't use the "p" word. It frightens people.
 
Let's just stick with a word like "alternative"

Re:I was worried about this

[pregister]

I eventually had to go into iTunes and put a FullAlbum tag on albums that I don't want mixed into any shuffle or any other playlist (and, of course, made my smart playlists filter those out). Beatles, Dylan, Pink Floyd...stuff I really like but think are best appreciated in the context of the album.

Re:I was worried about this

[WilliamSChips]

And then just about every album they made after was criticized by the music company as "not having a good song to be a single".

Re:I was worried about this

[WilliamSChips]

except Karl Marx.

Re:I was worried about this

[djasbestos]

It's the difference between being an artist and being a businessman. If people create music primarily for the love of music or to make a buck.

I used to wonder why shitty local bands got more shows than my (less shitty) local band of the same genre. The answer: I am too busy writing more music instead of focusing on promotion and booking and such. That being said, we've got a small but loyal fanbase...and admittedly, industrial isn't that popular in my area. Not to say that there aren't some really good bands that can pull this off, but I've seen shitty ones do it too, and popularity != skill or talent, neither in performance nor songwriting.

Re:I was worried about this

[The_Wilschon]

Ah. I am a fan, but don't have enough money to have everything they ever put out :'(

Re:I was worried about this

[Hwyman]

I love albums as well. What I love most (and will miss most) is the joy of discovery. I can't count the number of times I've picked up an album because of a particular single only to discover new songs I might not have heard of otherwise. Even more so are those songs that don't really register the first few times you hear them, but then one day it just clicks and becomes your most favorite song on the album.

Re:I was worried about this

[bladx]

"The people who bought Creep after ending u shouting at the top of their voice whilst in a drunken clinch and didn't like the res of their stuff aren't really Radiohead fans; they're a fan of that Radiohead single."

What does that mean in English?

Re:I was worried about this

[rstarg]

I think many people think they DESERVE to get rich quick.

Re:I was worried about this

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but Tool's overrated self-indulgent crap.

Re:I was worried about this

[Alucard454]

ya know, just a few short years ago, i would have agreed extremely wholeheartedly, but after 10000 days, i just can't seem to get behind tool like i could in the olden days. i dunno, either i'm growing out of them (god i hope not) or this album just wasn't as good (or rather, as much to my liking, i suppose). anywho, up to that point, i still agree that tool's albums are basically mindblowing. carry on. :P

Re:I was worried about this

[WilliamSChips]

He's trying to say that people who only like Creep and not other Radiohead songs are fans of Creep rather than of Radiohead. I don't know what the "after ending u shouting at the top of their voice whilst in a drunken clinch" bit means.

Re:I was worried about this

[WilliamSChips]

but listening to the album is like reading a Neal Stephenson book with a good ending That's it! We should have Johnny Greenwood end all of Neal Stephenson's books!

Re:I was worried about this

[WilliamSChips]

And if you're about to blow up New York, burn bright, not hot.

Re:I was worried about this

[WilliamSChips]

Almost all of the bands you listed also made a lot of money back in the 1990s when Kurt Cobain's corpse was selling all their albums, much like how JFK's corpse sold all of LBJ's policies.

Re:I was worried about this

[Lobster Quadrille]

Admittedly this is true with the bands I listed, but A) That doesn't change the fact that they make good albums, and B) there are plenty of modern (punk) bands with very good ideas, good music, and good live shows.

If we start to see smaller local shows get bigger and international tours get smaller, it isn't really a loss. Plenty of local bands are fantastic, and I live in bloody Utah.

Its interesting

[JamesRose]

How people normally start legally downloading, then turn to illegal downloading when either they can't afford, don't want to afford, or can't find the music they like. Very rarely however, have I heard of a music downloader who has ceased any illegal activity and started paying for the music, it just doesn't seem to happen. Now given this piece of information, you would thnk that teh music industry would be keen to stop people from downloading illegally in the first place, but all they've done is get a bad reputation by sueing everything and anything that has been near a 1 or a 0.

Re:Its interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

you would thnk that teh music industry would be keen to stop people from downloading illegally in the first place, but all they've done is get a bad reputation by sueing everything and anything that has been near a 1 or a 0.
 
they're sueing people who are downloading illegally! what are you; a retard?

Re:Its interesting

[senatorpjt]

Every CD i've bought for in the last 10 years has been after I heard a few songs off whatever p2p was around at the time.

Re:Its interesting

[vonFinkelstien]

I started out downloading illegally with Napster, but I bought a lot of CDs too. But when Apple came out with iTS, I eagerly awaited for it to be available in Sweden. First I only bought when I had money and still downloaded illegally. But after two years, now I only buy from iTS and on-line CD stores. I don't want to hunt and wait for some crap encoded file on P2P. I'm even thinking about deleting all those files from my HDs. iTS and CDs are best way to get music.

However, I'm nearly 40 and am not of the P2P generation that thinks everything should be available for free. I enjoy paying for entertainment. I also only buy classical, jazz, folk and bluegrass music. Pop is utter crap, and rock has lost its appeal for me.

Re:Its interesting

[Paulrothrock]

I've ceased my illegal activity and started buying music. It's a lot easier to find it on iTMS than it is to look for it on a P2P site, and I've also had music recommended to me that I like.

To put it another way: I've grown up and my time is worth more than the $1 it costs to buy a song.

Re:Its interesting

[tthomas48]

Yeah, you're wrong. There are lots of people who were "illegally downloading" music and now buy music. Now that Napster is (legally) free for 5 listens, I pretty much just listen to what I want first and then buy it if I like it. The fact of the matter is that there have always been leaches. In the 80s pretty much everyone had several tapes they had copied from a friend, just like pretty much everyone now has some mp3s they didn't buy legitimately. Everyone, though, had a "friend" or two who would copy every single tape every one of their friends had. These leeches are still around now. It's just easier for them to get lots of music, and it's become more socially acceptable. But they've always been around.

The problem is that the industry has been using those ultra-popular bands to bankroll their R&D artists (also called indie bands). The problem is that indie bands can get better support than the major labels can provide, so they're jumping ship. Thus the majors don't have the good indie bands, and they can't convince a sufficient number of people to buy American Idol albums to stay solvent. That's their problem.

Well let me tell you something

[Winckle]

On monday of this week, I bought two singles. On 7" Vinyl, they were bansd i wouldn't normally try, but since I dug out an old turntable, I don't mind paying the 99p for the cheap 7" singles. 2 songs at 50p each is terrific value, and you get cool artwork!

Now why don't they just charge 99p for the CD single? Surely they'd sell loads more!

Re:Well let me tell you something

[vuffi_raa]

for those of us idiot americans- how much is 99p in dollars?

Re:Well let me tell you something

[changling bob]

About $0.50

Re:Well let me tell you something

[unapersson]

You've got the exchange rate the wrong way around, 99p is about $2.

Re:Well let me tell you something

[changling bob]

Hot crap, my bad. I thought it seemed a bit low.

Re:Well let me tell you something

[vuffi_raa]

that's what I got when I looked it up- that is kind of funny because for a 45 rpm single here you pay $3-5 depending on if it is an indie- (indie is usually $5 because they cost more to produce) cd's new are usually around $22-25 (less for indie because CDs are cheap to produce indie- $5-$10 selling)

Back to the Future

[McFortner]

Recorded music started out as singles and is going back to that format. The only reason I can see for the album was to promote and justify the 33 1/3 LP format. With digital music, this concept is totally outdated and destined to die. Let me pick what I want and don't tell me what I have to take to get it. It's like buying a the whole Mu Gu Gai Pan meal when all you want from it is the egg rolls. Michael

Re:Back to the Future

[ChrisMaple]

It's very annoying, having to get up every four minutes to put a new record on the turntable while listening to a piano concerto.

Re:Back to the Future

[WilliamSChips]

The only reason I can see for the album was to promote and justify the 33 1/3 LP format. Well, go look for the albums that try to tell a story. Listen to them. Some albums need to be together like that. Some honestly don't. Now we have choice and choice is a good thing. But the album isn't dying--it's about to phoenix.

Re:Back to the Future

[notamisfit]

Am I going to find "Tales of Topographic Oceans" in your collection?

Re:Back to the Future

[scaryjohn]

It's like buying a the whole Mu Gu Gai Pan meal when all you want from it is the egg rolls.

But how else are the Chinese restaurants going to justify the three-partition styrofoam plate format?

Re:Back to the Future

[BryanL]

I somewhat agree with your first sentence, then are opinions diverge. Albums didn't promote the 33 1/3, it was the other way around. The LP allowed artists (or forced them) to come up with musical ideas that lasted longer then 3 minutes. The CD was the same way. And I don't think the album will die out, it will find a new equilibrium in the digital market. That point may be 50/50 or 20/80, I don't know.

But record labels can save the album with a few tweeks in the system, such as lowering the prices on CDs or releasing their strangle hold on radio and more importantly, internet radio.

Re:Back to the Future

[Anonymous Coward]

The only reason I can see for the album was to promote and justify the 33 1/3 LP format.

Well, some people are actual musicians and can fill a whole album full with stuff that's actually music. Most of the stuff now is over-produced muzak. As John Lee Hooker recently said on recording "Hooker 'N' Heat": "It don't take me no three days to record no album."

Re:Back to the Future

[TheRaven64]

Weren't albums originally books (think photo album) full of 78s? Albums have been around for longer than formats that let you play one from a single media.

Re:Back to the Future

[lawrenlives]

Here's an excerpt from Paul Simon's interview on Charlie Rose recently on his view of the evolution of the album as a form. The whole hour is definitely interesting viewing.

Paul Simon: I'm not heading towards an album, I don't know that I would make another album, the whole record business, as you know, is completely... it imploded and it's reforming in another way, and the idea of making a CD with...10 or 12 or 13 songs is..that may be an idea that's passed.

Charlie Rose: Because it's all MP3, it's all online?

PS: Well, when you put your iPod on shuffle, it does something to the way we listen, and then it becomes much harder to listen to one artist doing 11 new songs. The attention span has been shifted by that, in the same way our attention span is being shortened everywhere else, it's also been shortened there, and that may mean the end of that as a form. The CD, which came from the album, but what you do lose out of that is, it was a very nice form. Artists like to think of writing for a whole piece, it was enjoyable.

When it was vinyl albums and there was a Side A and a Side B, it really worked. I think that's because then one side was 20 minutes, 22 minutes, that's all it could hold, and then you stopped. That's a great attention span, 22 minutes. Then if you liked it you went on and flipped it over, played the other 22 minutes. When it got to the CD, that expanded to like 65, 70 minutes that you could contain on a CD, that's longer than your English class and y'know your attention span is not gonna go that long.

Re:Back to the Future

[Yehooti]

How is today so different than when I was a kid? Back then I'd save up my dimes and nickels until I could buy a 45 with something on it I really wanted. There'd usually be something on the other side that I didn't really care for, but I got what I wanted for 89 cents. Near as I can tell from what I can find on Googling the inflation rate since then, it'd probably cost in the order of $10.00 now for the same thing. From that perspective, I don't think we're getting newly shafted by paying multiple bucks for a single song today.

Re:Back to the Future

[glwtta]

It's like buying a the whole Mu Gu Gai Pan meal when all you want from it is the egg rolls.

Yeah! What the hell is it with having to listen to all of Die Walküre when I really just want the Ride of the Valkyries? Or having to look at the whole La Gioconda when I only like the smirk?

Come to think of it, where do they get off making me buy the whole song? What if I just want the parts where they go "Heeeyyy... Yaaaaaaa..." or "My lovely lady lumps" and not the rest of the filler garbage? This tyranny must come to an end!

(I think I hurt my sarcasm gland...)

Re:Back to the Future

[acvh]

I think Paul has it right. One of our local radio stations used to have a segment called, "The Perfect Album Side". Twenty minutes of great music. It's just an accident of technology that albums have grown to 60 or 70 minutes, and it IS too long. The problem now is that no one would buy a CD with only 8 songs and 40 minutes of music. UNLESS, it was priced less than a "normal" CD.

Re:Back to the Future

[vuffi_raa]

they banned styrofoam here in san francisco - chinese is all in cardboard now.

Re:Back to the Future

[vuffi_raa]

Come to think of it, where do they get off making me buy the whole song? What if I just want the parts where they go "Heeeyyy... Yaaaaaaa..." or "My lovely lady lumps" and not the rest of the filler garbage? This tyranny must come to an end! one word my friend.....
mashup

Re:Back to the Future

[hemp]

I think albums became very popular when 4/8 track player became popular in cars ( late 60's). You could buy an hours worth of music and stick it in your car stereo and rock out as you tooled down the highway burning that 25 cent/gallon gasoline.

Re:Back to the Future

[number6]

It's was also annoying to have to change the CD every ~60 minutes whilst listening to an opera (Wagner's Ring Cycle comes in at 14 CDs for example, most others fit on 2 or 3 CDs). A have a few collections, but generally I find music that lasts only a few minutes annoying.

I actually rip my CDs as a single file, since I generally want to either listen to the entire CD, or none of it. But then, pretty much my entire 'music' collection consists of classical, soundtracks or audio books, all of which are better listened to as an 'album'.

Re:Back to the Future

[chadwik01]

Personally, I don't have a problem with albums that are an hour long. What tends to get annoying is when an artist spends nearly two years on one album. I would support a shorter CD at a lower price if artists would begin releasing music more often. I'd much rather see them go back to the days of two albums a year. This allows for the new music to be spread over a period of time and also for the artist to stay in the spotlight.

Re:Back to the Future

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the smirk is a defining characteristic of the painting.
 
In many cases, tracks on albums have no relation to each other. They just happened to have been written in a similar timespan, and lumped together.

Re:Back to the Future

[acvh]

gotta agree with you there. i find it amusing that a third rate band can take 2 or 3 years to make a new CD, when a band like The Beatles or The Stones could put out 2 a year during their prime.

the first Ramones album was recorded in a day and lasted all of 26 minutes. yet it remains an all time great.

Re:Back to the Future

[GWBasic]

Recorded music started out as singles and is going back to that format. The only reason I can see for the album was to promote and justify the 33 1/3 LP format. With digital music, this concept is totally outdated and destined to die.

It really depends on the kind of music. There are many albums that are incredible works of art, from start to finish. The Flaming Lips, NiN, Dream Theater, and the Apples in Stereo have all recently released excellent albums.

People have been writing long works of music for hundreds of years. Beethoven wrote 9 popular symphonies; the reason why a CD can hold 74 minutes of music is so that Beethoven's 9th could fit on 1 CD. Even today, people pay $100s of dollars to see Roger Waters perform Dark Side of the Moon as a continuous work.

Perhaps you have a short attention span? Perhaps you only listen to music that's not condusive to albums? So you don't like works of music that are 30-60 minutes long? It doesn't mean that the art form will fall out of favor.

Correct me if I'm wrong

[Richard McBeef]

But I think the music industry has known that for about 50 years.

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[shark72]

"But I think the music industry has known that for about 50 years."

And, the iTunes store sold their two billionth track in January. Sales of digital singles have been insanely huge for the past seven years or so.

I read the Ars Technica article a few times and I don't really see what its purpose is, other than to try to make the reader feel smarter than the record industry as a collective whole. In short, it's a huge straw man. To quote:

The industry should be paying closer attention to its meteoric rise and less attention to the dying, arcane album.

What is Ars Techica's evidence that the record industry isn't already paying close attention, or putting an undue amount of attention toward their CD business? Record companies are like any business: they'll sell what the customer wants as long as there's money in it. As long as an acceptable number of customers still want to buy CDs, they'll keep making them available, despite Ars Techica's protests. What specifically as Ars Technica asking? That record companies stop pressing CDs?

And:

It should absolutely drop the rhetoric about how piracy is destroying the business, because the sea change in sales patterns shows that something else is is afoot.

And this would benefit... whom? The record industry will milk the piracy issue as long as it's in their best interest to. Fry's Electronics sells stuff and they put efforts into controlling shoplifting. Auto makers keep building cars and improving anti-theft technology. Astophysicists may disagree, but walking and chewing gum can indeed be performed simultaneously.

In short... lame, pointless article, devoid of facts or true insight, and written only to make us feel better about pirating.

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[senatorpjt]

And, the iTunes store sold their two billionth track in January. Sales of digital singles have been insanely huge for the past seven years or so. How much of this has to do with the fact that while there is a price benefit to buying a single track off iTunes versus a CD album, there is no benefit to buying an album off iTunes versus buying a CD? I'd buy a single off iTunes (well, only one of the DRM-free ones), but I still wouldn't buy an album when I could get the actual CD for the same price off Amazon.

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[Belacgod]

Lots of times Itunes is cheaper. It depends what you listen to--some CDs I want cost $10, and I buy 3 and use supersaver free shipping; others cost $16 and I download them.

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[vonFinkelstien]

Everyone likes to think that the Music Industry is stupid. They're just resistant to change. They've been milking the Album/CD cow for decades now. The 70s really made it work well with concept albums. But what they really wanted to do was to get you buying albums so that they could charge you album price for that one song you liked on the radio. Now that model is evaporating. So they want to strong-arm Apple into letting them charge more for the pop singles, so that they will be near the price of an album (what they really want is for it to be the same price as an album).

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[senatorpjt]

Well, even $16 vs. $10 for an album is quite different than $16 vs $1 if you only want one song off it, which is more what I was getting at. I'd pay $6 extra to get the actual CD with the box and liner notes and physical disc. If I only wanted one song off the CD, paying $15 extra is a different story.

Let me be the first to say..

[ynososiduts]

Duh? Why is this even news? Many music groups have one good song, and the rest of the album stinks. Most people that use the usual peer to peer networks download one song, and not entire albums. I perfer legal torrents because you get the album in just one convenient download. But I still perfer to buy my music in LP vinyl format.

I like albums

[Slashdot Junky]

Dear world,

I like albums and have found time after time that the songs not released as singles are even better. Singles are what you hear for free on the radio and during that one hour on MTV/VH1 when they are actually showing videos. Why pay for what you're likely to hear at any given time. Pay for what you're missing and find like I do that there's so much more good stuff on an album.

Later,
-Slashdot Junky

Re:I like albums

[WilliamSChips]

You are not the same person as the rest of the world--however, you aren't being oppressed here, because that stuff has always been available either as the B-side or independently on iTunes(or as the album discount)--it won't go away because people prefer to buy singles.

Re:I like albums

[RedElf]

I agree whole heartedly with the parent post. Death of the album would be a sad day for music creativity. High quality artists put out catch singles to draw you into the album where the not so catchy but higher quality gems reside.

If the artists you listen to only put out one or two good songs per album, then you're not listening to quality artists in the first place. This is a simple cause and effect and it's your own damn fault they continue to do so because of your support for their low quality music.

Re:I like albums

[Anonymous Coward]

I like albums and have found time after time that the songs not released as singles are even better. Stairway was never intended to be a single - and in fact was not reviewed well when first released.

Albums

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me old fashioned, I had an 8 track deck in my 74 Duster, but I like albums because they're the measure of an artist.
Take someone like Britney who will pump out five good singles and buy her album. The rest is just filler which underscores the truth that she's made by a corporate committee and a no-talent when she goes outside the formula. Still using her example, if she was really that good then one would be able to listen to the full album. After a while, one would get used to hearing Song A followed by Song B and so forth rather than thinking "WTF IS THIS SHIT" and skipping to the next hit.
A good artist, let's leave this up to the reader lest this devolve into a flame war about (my) taste, would have a good album with only one or two bad songs.
Singles are the bread and butter of one hit wonders and fly by night talent. A good album will be purchased for decades to come. Just look at Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club.

Re:Albums

[WilliamSChips]

A good artist(except when he's doing a concept album) can now release songs when they're ready and now you don't have to wait five years.

Re:Albums

[heptapod]

Are you saying that waiting is the hardest part? Because every day you see one more card.

Go figure

[SnoopJeDi]

Singles are what people listen to the most. Gee, the radio industry has only been onto this for....40 years? Personally, I find myself buying few albums, lots of songs. Only if it's an artist I REALLY enjoy do I buy albums (this is all online, that is)

Re:Go figure

[martin_henry]

Singles are what people listen to the most. Gee, the radio industry has only been onto this for....40 years?

Your logic of causation is wrong. Singles are what people listen to most becuase they are what radio stations play.

Re:Go figure

[gordgekko]

And yet singles (1870s) existed before music playing radio stations (early 1900s).

Custom Albums

[resistant]

You'd think the music industry would have smartened up by now and started offering custom albums with a customer's favorite songs burned onto them for a small fee over and above the fees for the songs themselves, making a fair profit from getting the customer keen on having a good-sized collection that *he/she* picked out on-line or at a kiosk, on a decent-quality DVD recordable delivered either at said kiosk or at a local shop which owns specialised equipmentfor that. Not everyone wants to have to do this stuff himself/herself with downloaded (and compressed, less than full-quality) songs.

But no, it's all about cramming junk songs down people's throats along with a very few good ones. Greedy pigs.

Re:Custom Albums

[shark72]

"You'd think the music industry would have smartened up by now and started offering custom albums with a customer's favorite songs burned onto them for a small fee over and above the fees for the songs themselves, making a fair profit from getting the customer keen on having a good-sized collection that *he/she* picked out on-line or at a kiosk, on a decent-quality DVD recordable delivered either at said kiosk or at a local shop which owns specialised equipmentfor that. Not everyone wants to have to do this stuff himself/herself with downloaded (and compressed, less than full-quality) songs."

Not sure if you were being ironic, but that's been tried several times; there were cassette-based kiosks in the 80s and CD-based kiosks in the 90s. They were located in record stores.

Not to say that there's no room for another chance to succeed, but given the highly speculative nature of the record industry and the fact that every attempt so far has failed, I wouldn't expect to see sometbody trying it again soon.

Re:Custom Albums

[Anonymous Coward]

Richard Branson's Virgin records tried this in the UK. I guess it was not a success.

Re:Custom Albums

[Bob of Dole]

No. That's a horrible idea (from the perspective of a label)
So I've got twenty artists signed on to my label. Say four of them are world-class artists that can consistantly put out an album packed with awesome tracks.
The rest, well... they manage between one and five good tracks an album. We make sure those are the ones that get radio play, of course.
So, say a customer has a budget of five albums. They like about half of my artists.
So they buy two of the awesome full-of-good-tracks albums and three of the few good/most bleh albums.
I make 5 albums worth of profit, and they end up with three albums with only a few good tracks on them. All is good.

Now, some smart bastard sets up this CD burning kiosk. He makes sure everyone gets paid a fair price per song, so it's all legal.
But now, see what the customer can do? They can use their give album budget to buy two of the quality albums and one of those custom single-packed albums. They get all the good tracks off the not-world-class albums on ONE CD!
Instead of having to purchase three albums for five songs. They're paying for only exactly what they want!
Now they just buy three albums instead of five, and get exactly what they wanted. Hell, they may get more than with the pre-kiosk method, since they can get singles off dozens of albums, far more than their previous three.
I'm out the price of three albums. (Or more, since before they might buy some more of those one-hit-per-album CDs later, but now? no, they've got the single already)

Clearly this is a horrible idea.

Albums are great

[I'm Don Giovanni]

I'll be very sad to see albums go away and we are left with a bunch of singles. Albums are like a complete work, singles are merely chapters. Would anyone really prefer a world without albums like Sgt. Pepper, What's Goin' On, It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back, Electric LadyLand, Dark Side of The Moon, Kind of Blue, Purple Rain, etc, to be replaced by a bunch of singles?

Besides that, I've found that if a single prompts me to listen to the corresponding album, I grow to like the entire album (I know many here say that albums only have one or two good songs, and then filler garbage, but I've not found that to be the case at all; no album that I've ever bought has been like that).

I really don't understand those that celebrate the demise of albums.

Re:Albums are great

[i)ave]

I have moderator points, but I just had to comment on your post. Sgt. Pepper's, Dark Side of the Moon, etc... were albums filled with value from the first track to the last. They stopped making albums like that in the 80's, when they figured out that a one-hit-wonder could sell their one hit on an album filled with crap and then charge the consumers a full-album price. I'd love for albums to still be filled with 15 awesome songs, but that's just not reality anymore. I for one am overjoyed at the prospect of an end to albums.

Re:Albums are great

[Neil Blender]

To quote Homer Simpson: "Everyone knows Rock attained perfection in 1974."

Re:Albums are great

[McFortner]

Albums are like a complete work, singles are merely chapters

• Most

albums are just a single or two with whatever drek they can afford to buy for them to record. The few albums that are "complete works" tend to do very poorly. Most people want a the few songs from the artists they like. That is why mix tapes and cds are so popular, no junk.
One of the only labels that got that was K-Tel. They gave the public what they wanted (usually) and none of the junk. And where are they now? Gone. Face it, RIAA, albums just don't sell.
Michael

Re:Albums are great

[RedElf]

I really don't understand those that celebrate the demise of albums. Those that do are damn fools who take not the time to appreciate what they have. Listening to a full album by a quality artist is not unlike taking a proverbial break to stop and smell the roses.

Re:Albums are great

[vux984]

Would anyone really prefer a world without albums like Sgt. Pepper, What's Goin' On, It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back, Electric LadyLand, Dark Side of The Moon, Kind of Blue, Purple Rain, etc, to be replaced by a bunch of singles?

Have you heard the other 14 tracks on the last [insert pop sensation here]'s album?

That sort of music doesn't need an album. Period. So albums, for that group of people is going to disappear. Big loss. The next generations Britney Spears doesn't get a record deal, she gets her 6 singles over 4 years, and then we never hear from her again.

But you are mistaken if you think its going to stop the likes of David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd, Prince, Nine Inch Nails,... hell even the likes of Eminem or the Fugees from releasing full albums, or concept albums. The market will bear those albums.

Re:Albums are great

[suv4x4]

I'll be very sad to see albums go away and we are left with a bunch of singles. Albums are like a complete work, singles are merely chapters.

Don't be sad, we'll be mostly seeing pop music products go exclusively to singles for the plain reason this is how they work best (there's not coherence between the tracks in the album, no message, no chapters).

As the labels lose more and more ground under their feet, independents artists will feel more confidence to pick their own music format to offer to their fans. Some of it will make sense as a 4 track mini album, some as 3 hour mix, some as singles: anything that the artists believes is best.

Labels are likely to be relegated to the role of venture capital companies that sponsor select artist with "mainstream" potential (and losing exclusive access to distribution channels, production etc)

Re:Albums are great

[Nyeerrmm]

I'd disagree, I have a bunch of albums I listen to straight through all the time, maybe skipping one or two songs, and they are pretty recent, for example:

Ben Folds - Songs for Silverman
Death Cab - Transatlanticism
White Stripes - White Blood Cells
The Shins - Chutes Too Narrow
Train - For Me It's You
Semisonic - Feeling Strangely Fine
Ben Kweller - Ben Kweller
Matchbox 20 - Yourself or Someone Like You

etc... I think they're amazing albums, and I listen to them regularly, among others. I think it's easy to judge music as all good in the past and all bad now, but its not really true, its just not what you hear on the radio all the time, and from what I've heard its always been that way. For instance Nick Drake is one of my favorite artists from the 70s, but he was never popular, and Led Zeppelin and The Eagles from what I've heard werent heard nearly as often the Captain and Tenil or whatever other crap I'm too young to have actually heard.

Of course, the quality of those particular albums is just my opinion.

Re:Albums are great

[glenstar]

That is true.

(and, no, there is no affiliate link there... just happened to be the first link on Google)

Re:Albums are great

[StikyPad]

Would anyone really prefer a world without albums like Sgt. Pepper, What's Goin' On, It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back, Electric LadyLand, Dark Side of The Moon, Kind of Blue, Purple Rain, etc, to be replaced by a bunch of singles?

Really good albums are rare -- always have been, and always will be. Those with the talent and desire to compose them will still be able to, and those who cannot will not be compelled to. If anything, pure digital distribution helps to level the playing field so more artists with the talent to produce an album will have the opportunity to be heard (although marketing will, as always, play a factor. You have to get people's attention somehow*). I don't see the rise of digital distribution as the death of the album, but the birth of choice. I do however feel that pricing should be more in line with the now-defunct allofmp3.com rather than the scandalous iTunes fleecing.

* Some cite Pandora as a good method of discovering new music, but in my experience, it's only effective as a way of finding music that sounds almost *exactly the same*. Put in Neil Young, and you'll get more jazz guitar. Tribe Called Quest, and you'll get more east coast rap. It's also very good at categorizing music -- Plug in Nirvana, and you'll get Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Foo Fighters, etc. But my experience has been that it is, in fact, a very poor way of finding truely new music -- especially if you're looking for something that sounds different -- and it's not at all good at qualifying what makes an artist good beyond the style they use or the "sound" they have. For the most part, I don't expect software to ever fulfill that role, because great art cannot be quantified.

Re:Albums are great

[dc29A]

I'd love for albums to still be filled with 15 awesome songs, but that's just not reality anymore. There are plenty of good albums, not just one good song and rest fillers but not from major labels. Lot of indie/small labels have some great bands who produce entire records with quality songs.

From the top of my head, some recent albums (2006/2007) that are great entirely not just one song:
Loreena McKennit - An Ancient Muse
Agalloch - Ashes Against the Grain
Dream Theater - Systematic Chaos
Katatonia - The Great Cold Distance
Liva - De Insulis
Virgin Black - Requiem Mezzo Forte
Mastodon - Blood Mountain
Iron Maiden - A Matter of Life and Death

Probably others I forgot. Lot of great records from indie/unknown/obscure bands, ya know, the real musicians. Of course, if people are looking for the MAFIAA to bring them quality music, they will be disappointed. Not many quality bands left on main labels.

Re:Albums are great

[Phanatic1a]

Albums are like a complete work

The RIAA has been pushing that line ever since Sgt. Pepper, because that lets them package music in a way that's more convenient to them. All they need to do is find a hit single, wrap it in an album's worth of crap, and sell it for $18. Here's a great article on the conflict between selling the single and selling the album. You speak of Sgt. Pepper? Fine. But you ignore the marginalization of whole genres of music as the push for the concept album came to dominate the industry:

It's laughable to even consider this now, but in 1966, while the Beatles were working on what became Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, EMI stole two of the catchiest songs from the sessions ("Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever") and issued them as a chart-topping "double-A-side" single; the Beatles left the songs off the album, released months later. Nowadays, that would be unthinkable. The label would release "Penny Lane" to deejays, "work it" to radio for six months or so and then, with carefully planned synergy, release an album with the built-in hit while working a second single. Rather than being the singles-free "concept" album we know, Sgt. Pepper would have been strip-mined for hit after hit.

And would that have been so bad? For one thing, the idea of the single-free, artistically "pure" album has proved to be (mostly) a crock, the occasional Led Zeppelin or Radiohead album notwithstanding. But there was a bigger problem with Sgt. Pepper, which officially kicked off the "album era" (even though it followed Pet Sounds by months and several Frank Sinatra concept albums by a decade, but never mind): it gave the music industry a new business model - one to which it still mindlessly clings, 40 years later.

Once labels saw that long-playing albums could sell as well as or better than 45-RPM singles, the whole emphasis changed. Music was meant to be heard, enjoyed, judged and, most important, purchased at length. The standard unit of measure for music became not the song, but the bundle of songs. Labels built their economic foundation around people's willingness to buy more than one song by an artist at a time.

So began three decades of artistic evolution - the best artists created brilliant, ageless album-length statements - and commercial devolution. In the '70s, labels treated rock acts as "album acts" and pop and R&B acts as "singles acts," prioritizing the former and ghettoizing the latter. In the '80s, labels emphasized albums that could be milked dry for hits: Thriller, Purple Rain, Born in the U.S.A., True Blue, Control, Hysteria, Faith - each spinning off five, six, even seven hits until radio listeners succumbed and bought the damned thing already. At least then, they let you buy the singles, too. By the '90s, overcome by greed, the labels decided to eliminate singles altogether, withholding radio smashes from the under-$5 market. You like that Fugees song we've spread across R&B, rock, top 40 and adult-contemporary radio over the past year? Come and get the full CD, it's on sale for 16 bucks. Pop lovers got whiplash, as they went from the '80s mode of hearing hit acts saturate radio with a string of singles to the '90s model - hearing one hit burned out for the better part of a year. One admiring Billboard article I read in the mid-'90s actually marveled at A&M Records' ability to promote the Gin Blossoms song "Hey Jealousy" for about 15 months.

When you look at pop-music history this way, the Napster movement at the end of the century can be read as a true, epoch-ending rebellion - not just to the mediocre quality and high prices of CDs in the '90s, but to an industry that misread human nature back in the '60s and can't admit it made a mistake. It's the songs, stupid! The public has tried to deliver this message to musicians and the industry over and over: let us buy the songs, and we might buy the album too; we learn to love an act one song at a time, n

Tomorrow's lesson...

[ChrisMounce]

...how we feel about DRM.

They're still not getting it.

[Hawthorne01]

The Fake Steve Blog had the absolute best analogy for the music business and digital delivery and the iTunes Store:

Ironically the mistake the major labels made was the same one that IBM made when it gave the DOS franchise to Microsoft nearly 30 years ago. They were faced with a new market that they didn't understand. They had a piece of work that they couldn't do on their own or didn't want to do on their own and they didn't view it as critical or important, so they outsourced it to a partner. The partner turned that seemingly unimportant work into a way to accrue power and create a monopoly and control the industry. Today in the music business we're about where IBM and Microsoft were in 1989, when IBM finally got hit with the clue stick and realized what Microsoft was doing.

Album = 2 singles + padding. Where's the value?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Most people buying albums only really buy it for a few songs, with most of the rest being padding so that "you get your money's worth".

Singles are far better value for money (you buy what you want), but are far harder to handle in physical form. Singles on CD etc are a pain for manufacturers (more lower-value titles == more work for less money), record stores (more stock, lower prices,...) and for the listener (changing CDs after each track).

Singles do, however, make a lot of sense in download form. They're easy to manufacture (http) and use (itunes etc) and you only pay for what you want. The people who lose are the labels and record stores since they find it hard to add value any more.

Re:Album = 2 singles + padding. Where's the value?

[prockcore]

The people who lose are the labels and record stores since they find it hard to add value any more.

And the artists. We're heading toward a future where people will have an ipod full of 1000 different artists, one song each. They won't know the name of the artist.. they certainly won't be watching to see what that artist does next.

Re:Album = 2 singles + padding. Where's the value?

[Idarubicin]

We're heading toward a future where people will have an ipod full of 1000 different artists, one song each. They won't know the name of the artist.

Whyever not? If I've found something that I like, why wouldn't I look for more things like it? Why would I go groping in the dark for random new artists when I have a name I can search for on iTunes sitting right there on the screen of my iPod?

Is it possible that I won't like the artist's other tracks? Yep. Would I still tend to search for music from an artist who wrote at least one song I liked? Yep.

Re:Album = 2 singles + padding. Where's the value?

[Anthony Baby]

Having grown up connected to the engineering side of the music business, and having been a strong music lover for so long, I learned that there is a large segment of the music business for which it makes sense to focus on singles. Certain genres of popular music naturally coalesce around the creation of albums as standalone musical experiences: album-oriented rock and heavy metal, and especially jazz. But pop, especially synthpop and dance music, is its own beast.

A typical pop album today is produced from tracks written by one or more professional songwriters that may or may not have collaborated with the popstar on more than a superficial level. So you get 8-12 tracks that are completely isolated from each other except for what work the album's producer did in order to create a cohesive arrangement and a common musical sound.

It just makes sense from every perspective for certain types of music to be distributed as singles. It makes zero sense to distribute singles on CD even after you factor in wonderous joy that might be a really cool B-side. Digital distribution is the most sensible medium for such artists... of course, if that distribution is in anything less than a lossless format... *grin*

As for the types of music that do deserve being distributed as albums; I think things will be okay. Maybe some kid downloads "Blackboard Sky" and discovers the lyrical mastery that was Wall of Voodoo. Downloadable singles may become the gateway drug to great albums by The Beatles, Pink FLoyd, Rough Cutt... okay, maybe not Rough Cutt. If not, no real harm done, because the fans are certain to download the full album. Anyway, this is really most relative to pop music. Rock fans and jazz fans tend to put a lot more attention into things like the physical media on which the music is distributed, the production values put into the album artwork and liner notes, and total runtimes.

Your hindsight goggles are blurry

[geekoid]

IT has always been the case that most albums are filled with crap. Always. The greats just remain with time.

Very few albums are works. There will always be a place for them. Now we gert to buy what ever single we want and not get the crap tracks, AND very often you can sample all the songs, so that odd awesome 'b side' song no one plays might also get picked up.

Things have gotten better in that respect.

Now if we can get to a place where artists can just kick out an occasional song to iTunes directly.

Imagine if a couple of your favorite musicians pounded out a little something for kicks and then post it immediately? Sweet stuff that would be, AND it would allow them to make more money.

Re:Your hindsight goggles are blurry

[i)ave]

I don't agree that the "greats" have remained with time. I think the "greats" exemplify the point that without the threat that singles pose to them, they will put one good song on an album filled with crap. Madonna, Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney could easily be considered among the greats, yet their albums since the death of the single have become mostly filler. They just don't have an incentive to produce great albums packed with value anymore. Singles created a threat to them. If they only had one or two good songs for every 15 they recorded, then people would go buy the singles and they'd make less money. When the music industry eliminated singles in the 1990s, even the so-called "greats" became less great. Why put out 15 fantastic songs when one will do the job and you can make the same amount of money?

Albums do have a place

[Anonymous Coward]

I only listen to full albums when listening to music. When done right, it can be like a symphony -- you only get the full effect and development of the music when listening to all of the movements.

Dark Side of the Moon, OK Computer, 10,000 days, to name a few, are all great albums that are best enjoyed as a whole rather than as singles. I'd rather not give them up.

The rise of albums can be linked

[noewun]

To the rise of FM radio in the mid to late 60s and 70s. FM was "free form" back then, which gave local DJs the ability to program a more varied and deeper set of songs, rather than the same 40 or 50 "hits" mandated by Clear Channel. Even in my early teens years (the 1980s) you could still find local radio stations which played entire albums, usually on a Friday or Saturday night. Now, of course, this is not the case. Listen to a Clear Channel-owned radio station in Minneapolis and one in Atlanta and the only difference will be the ads. No cuts from deeper on a disc, nothing weird or unusual, just the same 40 or 50 songs played over and over.

Obviously There are other factors which influence this. Musical tastes and styles change, as in the late 1950s and early to mid 1960s, the 45 rpm single was king. But I still believe that the conglomeration and corporatization of FM radio has done enormous harm to music. And it's the main reason I haven't listened to terrestrial radio in more than a few brief snatches in several years, as whenever I give it a try I hear the same repetitive song lists over and over. I give my listening time and money to internet radio.

Re:The rise of albums can be linked

[TheRaven64]

When I'm playing my own music, I have iTunes shuffle by album, so I hear one complete album, then another random one. I listen to a few genres of music, and it's just too jarring to jump between some of them for a single track.

When I'm bored with my own music, I listen to Radio Paradise. It doesn't play albums, but each small group of songs (usually 3-5) is selected to flow together to the extent that I fairly often don't notice where one ended and the next began.

My point (assuming I have one) is that it doesn't matter whether you're listening to albums or singles so much as whether a human has selected the order of tracks. With a good album, this is obviously the case. With a decent DJ it's also true. An album is just a set of singles that have been arranged to go together, just as a symphony is a set of movements that have been written to go together. Someone with talent can create a good 'album' from tracks by different artists, but a computer still can't.

Re:The rise of albums can be linked

[twrake]

Of course those were the days of cassette tapes an some people would tape the entire album from the FM broadcast. Who really cares about perfect digital copies of audio. The perfect stereo of the 70s with the Helium tweeters is just techno junk. You ears don't have the response.

Re:The rise of albums can be linked

[zippthorne]

Who really cares if the clear channel station in atlanta and minneapolis have exactly the same play schedule? It's not like you can ever tune both stations. Now if every channel in atlanta plays exactly the same stuff, then you've got problems.

Of course, I've given up almost entirely on FM because it it is so homogeneous. In a medium sized market, you've got your 4 generic country stations, your 3 generic beat-box stations, and your generic pop station, which is a beat-box station weekends and evenings. If you're lucky, you've got an oldies station, but even the oldies get old if you can't listen to anything else.

Re:The rise of albums can be linked

[ClamIAm]

It's not like you can ever tune both stations.

This isn't really the problem.

(In my opinion) The problem with Clear Channel-like control over media is that it allows a very small group of people enormous influence over a society. The way they operate destroys and/or highly inhibits the growth of things like "culture" and "political discourse".

I say this because I feel that such top-down control of broadcasting is antithetical to how, for example, musical acts should gain recognition. My ideal way would be for all radio stations to be locally owned and operated, with competing stations in all places possible. They would scout the local music scene for good acts and give their stuff a try, and/or share it with other stations who would also decide whether to play it. People would call in to request songs, giving the stations a metric on the popularity of the music. In this system, bands would naturally rise and fall based on popularity. It would also allow regional influence over music, e.g. an area that doesn't have many fans of country music wouldn't hear as much of it.

Re:The rise of albums can be linked

[drspliff]

Internet radio, and to some extent some of the BBC 'alternative' radio stations and shows (John Peel's show for example) are taking it's place.

Of the radio stations I listen to, there isn't a 24 hour schedule so whoever's broadcasting late at night during weekdays will probably just stick on random albums when they need to do other things (collect kids, make dinner or whatever) or just play random interesting tracks for the first 30 minutes of their show. Or in the case of John peel, completely random things all the time.

Commercialism of radio has seriously diluted the quality of music generally being played, and if anything is keeping people ignorant to other types of music.

Re:The rise of albums can be linked

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

Actually, the 'rise of albums' can be linked to the rise of 78 RPM records. A 'record album' is called that because back before 33.3 LPs (Long Play), you'd buy something that looked just like a photo album -- except that it was full of records! Each album would contain 5 or 6 disks, each of which had a single cut, or 2 per disk, or around 10-12 songs per album. Hence, that was the standard number of tracks on LPs and is still the standard number on a CD. I too was a teen in the early '80s, but was raised by WWII era parents, who owned actual record albums.

As an aside, IMHO, recordings like _In A Gadda Da Vida_, _Thick As A Brick_, etc., were ground-breaking not so much because of the music, but rather that they made use of the new medium -- an entire LP side, rather than the standard 'single' length of around 3 minutes, which is about what 78s could handle.

Re:The rise of albums can be linked

[noewun]

Sweet. I learn something new every day.

Releasing as Singles Would Actually Help A Lot...

[FreeKill]

I actually think most artists underestimate how much releasing in singles would probably HELP their sales rather than hinder it. Think about it like this, I'm Artist A and I have 12 songs I've done of which 3 are really good, 5 are so so, and 5 are filler. If you release as an album, the best you can hope for is the album does well by virtue of the 3 good songs which each get a turn at the top of the charts. Releasing as singles on iTunes over time, however, you can stagger it so when you release one of the good songs, you can follow it by 2-3 of the others due to its success. You'll get tons of more people focusing on the single and grabbing it hoping it's the same quality as the first one, and by the time they start realizing not all your work is the same quality you have the next good one ready to go...

A Number Of Reasons

[BryanL]

1. The cost of an album is not in line with the the cost of the single. Singles on an album are songs with the greatest value in terms of demand. Labels can charge a buck because people will pay it. People will not pay a buck a piece for the filler songs.

2. Maybe singles are selling because labels are focusing on making good singles (though that is debatable). At the least they are working harder to market them.

3. Singles sell because radio plays the single and nothing else on the album. Radio exposure = sales.

4. CD is the medium of albums and downloaded files are the medium of the single. As music downloads go up, so does the sales of singles.

5. As a correlary, as oulets for CDs sales dry-up, so do sales of CDs (I.E. B&M stores).

Re:A Number Of Reasons

[orthancstone]

I'd say an additional point is that compilations of music are more vogue than ever. It almost seems like radio focuses on 20-30 songs for a 3 month stretch of time so that it can be packaged and sold in stores while the next set of new tracks invade the airwaves.

One more comment while I'm at it: About a decade ago, we started seeing a noticeable increase in tv shows (most of them aimed at teenage audiences) adopting songs/bands as if they were releasing music to the public; the result was a proliferation of interest in these groups based on one song. It is worth wondering whether or not people grew to love that specific song for its link to the shows itself, and likewise a bare minimum of interest paid to other songs by that artist due to lack of significance to the shows they watched.

I mean, really, how many bands have achieved significant longevity after being introduced to the public in such a fashion?

Re:A Number Of Reasons

[tthomas48]

Well, most of the bands on the OC are still churning out very successful releases. I would say that actually most of the bands that are selling to TV shows and Ads now are the bands that have very successful albums. I mean Moby has a few albums running around...

Give consumers what they want

[Lightster]

The problem is consumers want everything for free.

Re:Give consumers what they want

[vonFinkelstien]

Especially the generation that has grown up with P2P. Some of my high school students wouldn't dream of paying for a DVD, CD or video game.

Wish Cable TV companies would learn this, too.

[jcr]

Right now, I don't have cable service or satellite, because they won't just sell me what I want. I have no interest in the sports channels, home shopping, bible-thumpers, most of the rest of the dreck they want to pile on. The first vendor who will just sell me HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, the major networks, and the history channel will get my business, and I suspect they'd get a lot of other people too.

-jcr

Re:Wish Cable TV companies would learn this, too.

[prockcore]

Personally, I like the fact that channels like SciFi are basically subsidized by the people who subscribe to cable mostly for ESPN1/2/3/4..

Otherwise it just wouldn't exist... shows would get canceled after one episode if they aren't immediate hits.

Re:Wish Cable TV companies would learn this, too.

[rgaginol]

Amen to that. The more industries which realise that preconceived ideas about 'pushing out in bulk' is an outdated idea, the better. Just think about television and radio stations as an example: once that was pretty much the only method of distribution - but if given a choice, how many people would actually choose someone else's arbitrary schedule for watching what we want.

There may have been a few reasons for doing this in the past, in the case of television primarily bandwith delivery, but this is clearly not the case any more. The organisations which realise this shift in consumer expectations sooner will survive. Those who don't are gonna go bust.

If the industries give us what we want in the package we want, we'll pay. If an industries offerings are no where near what we expect or bundled together with much uneccessary fluff, they should start looking at good coffins.

Re:Wish Cable TV companies would learn this, too.

[HikingStick]

While my choice of channels would be different, I, too, would be a cable customer if such a service were available. I want to decide what comes in and what I'm paying for. I don't want to pay inflated prices to subsidize some package of channels I don't want. The cable companies try to push it off onto the consumer, suggesting that we just delete the channels from our remote control channel list (or that we use the V-chip--blech!). They don't get it.

The reason they don't offer a la carte? Too many consumers are all too willing to fork over whatever dollars for which the cable companies ask just to get a package that includes their favorite channels. If even 20% of cable subscribers would simply ask for a la carte under threat of cancellation (and then be willing to go through with the cancellation), I think the cable companies would change their business model rapidly.

Anyone have a few million laying around to start a cable company in the upper Midwest that uses an a la carte business model?

Why harder for artists?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Why should it be harder for artists?

Many artists only produce a few great songs, but they need to generate a whole CD full of crap to record an albumn... that nobody wants. This cycle is driven by the labels.

What is much better for the artists is to generate the good songs that they can, on a budget they can afford. This makes it far easier for them to get published and make some money. It reduces the barrier of entry.

If anything a singles-based industry makes it far easier for more artists to participate and make money.

Re:Why harder for artists?

[Anonymous Coward]

If anything a singles-based industry makes it far easier for more artists to participate and make money.

"More artists" equals less name recognition per artist, equals less power for the artist, equals more power for the label/publisher to screw them over with the contract.

We've seen this in the "celebrity industry". Reality TV basically exists for the purpose of creating throwaway celebrities with zero marketable skills who can be used to sell magazines for a couple of months each, then dropped when they start getting the idea that they're worth something.

How is this "good for the artists" exactly?

Re:Why harder for artists?

[Hathor's Dad]

Your missing it... Music is a form of art. Selling records is a marketting agenda. If a musician wants to compose a hit single then that is art. If a musician wants to compose and album then that is art. My favourite albums are live recordings with 14 min tracks. If you have ever played a gig then you would know how the band agonises over the order and timing of each song. "Many artists only produce a few great songs" You have never heard of any significant portion of artists - only the ones your record company shows you. ..art is the lie that make you learn the truth..

Re:Why harder for artists?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is much better for the artists is to generate the good songs that they can, on a budget they can afford It's called an EP.

Re:Why harder for artists?

[WilliamSChips]

Because soon they won't need the record companies so they'll have a much bigger chunk of sales.

A simple analogy...

[WIAKywbfatw]

Hmmm, what's a suitable analogy here to illustrate the difference between something that you might casually sing along to a bit when you hear it on the radio/MTV and something that you'll want to be able to enjoy in context whenever you wish? Let's try this...

Singles are like trailers for a film. Albums are the film. There's more genius in a Martin Scorsese production than the 30 seconds you'll see during an ad break. Similarly, there's more genius to the average artist's music than is contained in the radio-friendly, appeal-to-everybody-possible tracks that the record company people decide to release as singles.

Personally, I'd favour a means of online pricing that encouraged people to listen to albums rather than just buy the odd single. I doubt it would appeal to many (or even be possible now that people are used to the current online pricing models), but $4 for a single track, $8 for the album would be fine with me.

I hate the idea that instead of a proper record collection, and a real appreciation for music and song as artforms, kids will grow up to have nothing but songs that just the catchy-yet-shallow songs that the radio/MTV happened to be blurting out for the decade or two that they spent growing up.

Re:A simple analogy...

[SnoopJeDi]

I'm not claiming that people should only listen to singles. You listen to a single, you enjoy it, you maybe look up the rest of the artist's work. But sometimes, I just want to listen to a single that I particularly enjoy. I don't want to have to buy the entire album. I find this especially true for myself for genres I'm not insane about. I like rap, but I don't listen to it very rigorously. I collect scattered songs (read: singles) that I enjoy, and leave the rest of the albums for the die-hard fans. When it comes to genres I really enjoy like rock, I tend to buy the whole album much more often.

Re:A simple analogy...

[Paulrothrock]

You're assuming that every album is a Scorsese-quality album. Without a doubt there are some albums like this, but most albums are Gore Verbinksi or worse just like many movies have all of their good parts in the trailer.

Seems to me the problem isn't the artist, but is instead the record company people who make artists produce appeal-to-everybody music that sells tons of records and makes them tons of money.

Re:A simple analogy...

[tthomas48]

Sounds like you just listen to a lot of singles by shitty artists. Most of the artists I listen to make really good albums.

Re:A simple analogy...

[WilliamSChips]

Why should we only listen to "good" artists? Why can't we like good songs from "bad" artists? Guess what? The fan's opinions always win, no matter what the artists or the record companies want to say. If you don't like it, here, have a gun.

Re:A simple analogy...

[tthomas48]

I do listen to singles by "bad" artists. But most of the music I listen to was made by good artists who have good albums.

No digital music downloads for me!

[Shrike9]

I too, like the album/CD format. Many of the tracks that aren't radio 'friendly' do grow on you and can become personal favorites. Modern radio has taken a handful of listener friendly tracks and THAT'S ALL YOU HEAR! For example: Fleetwood Mac, Boston, BTO - I can't stand them any more. Favorite bands back in the day. Also, if I can't have the physical media to use as a master backup copy for personal use - They're not getting my money. They can DRM themselves to hell and poverty for all I care.

Also the key is make buying as easy as possible.

[retrogameguy]

I spend hours in my car and switch constantly from one FM station to another (poor coverage around the hills), I'd love digital radio, which we don't yet have in New Zealand.

However to get to my point - if the radio reciever could be a little more intelligent and have a "buy song" button on it, I would be supprised if I didn't send atleast $20 - $30 each week on buying music. I idea would be to load a credit onto your account and whenever you hear a song you like - press the button and it downloads to your car MP3 player. You then own the song so can put on your IPOD, PC or whatever you want.

The important thing is to allow for impulse buying - make buying easy and you will make money! There are hundreds of songs I only hear once or twice every few years, and finding them online, whithout knowing the artist or song title is very difficult - if I could buy them with the press of a button, when I hear the song, then you will get my money, and lots of it.

One possible negative re-action

[Orig_Club_Soda]

Labels stop paying artists to produce 10-16 tracks and only pay for 2 or 3. Which would suck because I often like the lesser known tracks better.

I see it both ways

[hellfire]

I see it both ways. On one hand, a good band that makes a good album can tell a good story, or at least create a good set of songs. On the other hand, plenty of bands have a couple of good hits, and the rest are just filler. I guess it depends on the bands you listen to and the genres you are interested in. I know what I like. Personally, I like Kamelot, Indigo Girls, Black Eyed Peas, Creed, Lorena McKinett, and a range of other people you may or may not have heard of. Some of you may look at my 4 choices and say "yes definitely they make a good album" and some might think "why do you even bother? All I know is I like the albums they make, that's my preference. I know a few others, however, Like Nickleback, that I like one or two songs per album, so I rarely buy their music at all, because I like complete albums. I also like buying discount CDs so I can rip them and not be tied to any DRM, so I'm more album oriented than single MP3 oriented. When all singles are DRM free I'll consider getting more from iTunes.

This is the nature of all things in business. Sometimes a bundle is a great deal. Sometimes a bundle is an excuse to force you to spend more money than you want to.

Save yourself

[hellfire]

but now you'll be saved from whole albums of Britney Spears and Ashlee Simpson.

Save yourself... by not buying any part of a Britney Spears or Ashlee Simpson album!!!

shhhhhhhh!

[nomadic]

Most people buying albums only really buy it for a few songs, with most of the rest being padding so that "you get your money's worth".

Great, now you're going to provoke countless indie music snobs on slashdot to pontificate how the bands THEY like release whole albumfulls of great music.

As an audiophile

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who spent about $20,000 USD on a stereo I find this whole "down loadable lossy compressed emm pee three" music pure nonsense. Sure I have a Slimdevices unit but I play FLAC files ripped from CD through it. The majority of the time I am listening to the cd transport or the vinyl transport, listening to whole albums at a time.

Now to make me even more mad there's this message about having singles only. What's next? Ban sex and then the music industry starts selling commercial jingles? Diet Coke! Oh Diet Coke! You make me Smile!

The album is not going away, neither is the CD or the vinyl record as long as there's demand there's an outlet. Just because some teenagers are using P2P music sites like soulseek and the like to download each other's crappy compressed nonsense do not blame the music buying public for the demise of the album. Blame your Mickey Mouse club members you tried to turn into musicians.

Most of the music I buy is on independent labels, and knowing my tastes it will stay that way. The music industry isn't suffering, it just fragmented into non RIAA affiliated labels.

...but I only buy albums

[billsf]

This isn't quite right. The record companies biggest mistake appears to be 'trying to schedule creativity' and everyone should know that can't be done. The result is what people call 'filler'. If there are more than two tracks I consider 'filler', they've lost my business. I don't think many people over 20 buy singles and that's a problem. I purchase about five 'current' albums a year and many times more older ones. I've learned a hard lesson a few times: Nothing worse than buying an album to find out the only song you heard was the only good song on the whole album.

If record labels gave musicians more time, there would be better music. This is also where the Internet could play a big role. By releasing a song now and then for free, it would be easy for a producer and band to tell if they were on the right track. Today 'piracy' fills this role to a limited extent. Either way: "Airplay is airplay". No musician I've ever talked to (and that's quite a few) has _ever_ viewed piracy as a 'bad' thing. A band wants to be heard!

This is what consumers want?

[glwtta]

Well, I guess I'm screwed then, since what I want are good albums not the ability to just buy the single.

I may be wrong here, but I'm thinking that if you can't manage to put out a good album, that single of yours is probably not all that fantastic anyway.

LPs are where the profits are

[edwardpickman]

Traditionally hit songs have been a come on to buy the albums. Why not just produce hits singles? Well that's very much like picking the next hot stock only far worse. It's almost like picking winning lottery tickets. If they stopped producing albums and strickly produced singles then most of the profit would disappear as well as most of the professional music. It's not a matter of the customer is always right it's a capitalist system and is profit driven. No profit, no music.

Re:LPs are where the profits are

[andr0meda]

There once was a time when producing Albums came AFTER you had produced and promoted a few singles, and when it was apparent that people were willing to buy them. Albums are, after all, a collection of music. Preferably good music.

The record industry, however, sees it a little bit different. They sell CDs, preferably expensive ones. So they fill them up with junk and hope to score 15 lines on the leaflet. Somewhere along the way, and big thanks to Sgt. Pepper, suddenly we are buying albums because most of the groups don't even bother to release singles. Probably because they would not sell big anyway.

This twisted turn in pop-culture is one of the often forgotten tricks that the EMI's and the BMG's have played on their consumers. And then suddenly, when P2p and iTunes come along, suddenly, consumers "remember" what they want in the first place, and out goes the profit scheme of the middle-man.

And we're still surprised about this?

I'm not worried about this.

[Hott of the World]

I don't like albums. I don't like artists. I like music. Particularly, I like catchy singles. The only reason I don't just listen to the radio for my fix is that I enjoy my music on my terms.

I used to by Albums for the Songs. Unfortunately not every song is good. Not every song captures the mood as well as the best one, nor do they capture the same mood. Why am I buying these again?

Some people enjoy the album experience as it is now. Artists, more-so, since most albums aren't done in a single night, nor in the same state of mind. It really lets you explore the different atmospheres that the group goes through when making an album, at least if you don't have it completely remixed and reorganized by some music industry wiz.

Re:I'm not worried about this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither am I! I can say that of all the music I have listened to in the past ten years I have probably bought 0 albums from mainstream artists. It is a shame that the industry has their head so far up their ass that they can only taste their own tonsils and therefore have no time to try to taste something else. There is SOOOOO much good underground music that I KNOW would do well in the mainstream but some fucking suit who has a degree in business and was too busy drinking butwiper at the fraternity to even know that there was other music besides what was played for him on the radio is the one deciding what goes on that radio/disc. I hope the whole fucking industry burns and everyone in it dies a slow horrible death, like with really sharp pointy red hot metal, in their fucking ass! The fucking industry wouldn't know good music if it chopped their head off!

I am not bitter!

Re:I'm not worried about this.

[gregmac]

I used to by Albums for the Songs. Unfortunately not every song is good. Not every song captures the mood as well as the best one, nor do they capture the same mood. Why am I buying these again? I totally agree, and would extend this by saying I am sometimes in the mood to listen to a certain style/mood of music.. for example, when I'm just relaxing getting ready to go to bed, I might want to listen to a bunch of slower/quieter songs, and not the album that goes through a whole range of styles.

Re:I'm not worried about this.

[scotch]

I don't like albums. I don't like artists. I don't like music. Particularly, I like catchy singles.

There, I fixed that for you.

Re:I'm not worried about this.

[AndersOSU]

There was a cover story in USAToday about this about a month ago (hey, I was in a hotel room, stop judging me.) The main focus was the massive slide that rap has undergone in the last three years. I particularly liked the comparison that in 2003 the best selling album was The Eminem Show, and in 2006 it was The High School Musical soundtrack.

Their analysis was that one of several problems that loomed large was that rap is a very single driven genre, and people simply don't have to buy albums anymore. (The other major problem was that rap had lost all credibility with pretty much everybody.)

But sometimes a person is pleasantly surprised...

[dclozier]

I have only ever bought albums and don't plan on changing but I have to agree that most of the time there are only a few songs worth listening to on them. However, sometimes I am pleasantly surprised to find great songs that never seemed to have gotten any radio time where I live. "Straight to Hell" by Drivin n' Cryin for example. Maybe it was because I hadn't listened at the right time or right radio station but I had never heard the song before until I bought the album for "Fly Me Courageous". For this reason I plan on continuing with albums for as long as they make them. Sadly, these days there are not that many new bands that interest me enough to purchase their albums.

It depends

[KingSkippus]

It really depends on the artist and style of music.

With some artists, like the Beatles for instance, I like their singles. Their good stuff was really good, but their bad stuff was, well, crap.

However, some artists are much more conducive to an album-type experience. I always kind of hate hearing a Pink Floyd song on the radio. Not that I hate Pink Floyd, they're one of my all-time favorite bands. But pulling a song like Comfortably Numb out of the context of The Wall, Brain Damage out of the context of Dark Side of the Moon, and so on, well, it just doesn't do it justice.

It doesn't just have to be concept albums this applies to. A lot of albums have themes that run through them, even though each song stands pretty well on its own. Fleetwood Mac's Rumors is like that. Sure, each song is great, but all of them together are greater than the sum of their parts.

I think that a HUGE problem (in capital letters!) with the music industry today, aside from treating its customers as extortion victims, is that they don't want to aim for specialized tastes any more. They want everyone just to listen to the same pop crap they forcefeed us all, and if you don't like it, well, don't listen to anything at all. There is no room in their business model for people who like x type of music and other people who like y.

Re:It depends

[Kopiok]

The beauty of online music is that you are better able to find those specialized tastes. Even among legal services. It presents alternatives to the manufactured label crap, and I think that's why they're so scared. They fear the independent labels, which are exploding on the web, will steal their business.

Re:It depends

[Admiral Ag]

That's somewhat true, but I wouldn't change the way iTunes distributes music.

Like you, I prefer albums (and from the look of your post, the same ones you do), but there are a lot of groups that only ever did one or two decent things (like CCS version of "Whole Lotta Love"), and I only want that particular track.

However, I think that iTunes is much more conducive to album sales than people think, especially for new stuff. I've lost count of the number of times I've only wanted 3 or 4 songs off an album and bought them. Then iTunes says that I can complete the album for four or five dollars and get another 7 or 8 tracks. I'm always falling for that. In the old days if I bought the singles, I would have to pay full price for the album and that would discourage me from buying it. With iTunes plus buying an album is even better value, since the single tracks are more expensive and the albums are still the same price.

At least now we have a few months to decide whether we really want the whole thing.

I don't agree about the specialized tastes thing. It seems to me that music is more fragmented than ever. When I was a teenager people either listened to "rock" music, "pop" music, or "punk" music. Now there are all sorts of genres and subgenres and the record charts don't really have the same meaning that they once had. There probably will never be another phenomenon like the Beatles, where virtually every kid bought the record.

The record companies have also been pretty good at putting out a lot of old stuff with added value. I bought the Deluxe edition of "DIsraeli Gears" the other day, and it is superb value (a ton of extra tracks, radio performances, alternate versions, etc.). God knows how many copies that old record will sell. Not many I suspect, but whoever was responsible for putting that package together did an excellent job. Another good example is the box set of Johnny Cash Live at San Quentin. I didn't pay much for that, but you get the whole show, a book and a DVD of the film they made about it.

So, while not wanting to sound like a shill for the record companies, and acknowledging that they do put out quite a lot of crap and that some new stuff is clearly a ripoff, there is a lot of stuff that they take an extreme amount of care over, which probably doesn't make them much cash, and which is a real bargain for anyone who really likes music.

Re:It depends

[wasted]

...They want everyone just to listen to the same pop crap they forcefeed us all, and if you don't like it, well, don't listen to anything at all. There is no room in their business model for people who like x type of music and other people who like y...

Change a few words, and it applies to the automobile industry as well, and probably a lot of others. Too many industries have decided that marketing means making the people want what we want to sell, instead of selling what the people want.

Re:It depends

[drcagn]

Listen to Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's, or Abbey Road completely through--masterpieces of the album art form. The Beatles were pioneers of making the album a respectable medium; before them most bands were extremely singles-heavy. Stuff like the White Album, not so much, even though there are great songs on it. Other than that, I agree with your post. A good album is an entire book, full of ups and downs and different emotions and feelings. A single is like taking the climax from a book and reading it on its own. Yeah, it's good, but it has no meaning or significance by itself.

Re:It depends

[ghyd]

"Music industry", one word too much.

Re:It depends

[Kingrames]

Actually most of the time it does.

Take, for example, the idea of starting a story in the middle. It worked for Star Wars.

Or maybe you could rip a page out of the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. "They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose, nor spake nor moved their eyes. It had been strange, even in a dream, to have seen those dead men rise." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (my apologies to whomever may be offended if I recited that poorly from memory.)

It certainly doesn't become LESS emotional or imaginative by taking IT out of context.

It's perfectly possible for a song to be good, even if you take it out of its album. In fact, I prefer songs like that, because when I like a song, and I go to check out the album, I'd LIKE to see something that makes that song even better.

Kinda like hearing "One" on the radio and deciding to check out the whole album of "...And Justice For All." I certainly wasn't let down.

Re:It depends

[gacl]

I think a good analogy from ages past would be Beethoven. He could write a single 3 minute piece like For Elise, or a 45 minute piece like the Ninth Symphony. It depends on what the artist wants; what kind of statement it's trying to make.

Re:It depends

[Anonymous Coward]

My 'concept album' submission is "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs" by Derek & the Dominoes.

Every song is great and nearly all are about lost and/or unrequited love.

Brilliance.

Re:It depends

[AGMW]

There is no room in their business model for people who like x type of music and other people who like y.

Last August a bunch from Amsterdam started Sellaband and now there are 4500 or so Artists registered and 5 have hit the target and are recording and 2 more have their CD out.

The Artists come from all over the world, from all music genres, and as a Believer you get to have a listen and if you like what you hear you can buy a Part in the Artist for $10. If you change your mind you can take your ten bucks back until the target of $50000 is raised (5000 Parts) when the Artist gets put into a top recording studio to make their CD. The Believers get a Limited Edition copy of the CD (only 5000 printed) for each Part they own, and a share of the next year's revenue from sales of the ordinary CD, and from advertising revenue from downloads - the album tracks are available for download, 3 of them for free, and the rest at 50cents a piece for high quality, DRM free, music!

Not all of the music is to my taste, but it's still great to listen to new things!

I have "Parts" in one of the Artists who has completed his CD ... pop over and have a listen if you get the urge, and my tag below is another chap who's on his way to the $50K!

Re:It depends

[GospelHead821]

Just to offer a slight counterpoint to your claim that the industry wants everybody to listen to the same pop crap... Although the station to which I most frequently listen probably does not qualify as 'industry,' I have found that the local classical music station is top notch. It's a Minnesota Public Radio station and I recently donated $120 to their membership drive. There are almost no commercials (what passes for a commercial on that channel is one of the DJ's reading a cue) and they play a huge variety of classical music. Even better, none of the other stations in the area that play music that I enjoy (mostly country/western, in my case) has reception anywhere near as good. I suppose my point is that hope may lie in public radio.

Re:It depends

[drcagn]

There's a difference between creating a story that begins in medias res and taking one scene out of a story. Yes, taking the scene where Luke destroys the Death Star out of Star Wars and watching it on its own is a good scene even for people who haven't seen the rest of the movie, but it has no significance without having watched the rest of the movie.

But yes, for people who haven't read the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner (me), that quote doesn't seem that significant. All it does is scream "you need to read the rest to really understand this."

Yes, a single will often make you want to hear the whole album, but that just proves my point, doesn't it? :P

Re:It depends

[gordo3000]

if you honestly believe you have a limited number of choices in styles of cars and music, you're just ignorant. there are hundreds of very different models of cars, trucks, vans, minivans, and SUV's, etc out there.

maybe you are just blinded by the fact that they only advertise those cars that earn the most margin? then you are being fooled by the advertising and applying that limited perspective to the market.

even worse is if you think the music industry is all pop. I listen to music all the time and I've never listened to pop voluntarily even once in the last 8 years.

Re:It depends

[WilliamSChips]

Here's a real example: I've only seen the witch-burning part of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and now I want to see the rest.

Re:It depends

[ChrisA90278]

"With some artists, like the Beatles for instance, I like their singles. Their good stuff was really good, but their bad stuff was, well, crap."

Odd that you should pick the Beatles as an example. Beatles are usually sighted as THE example of how albums can be more then just a collection of unrelated tunes. The albums that you listed "Dark Side of the Moon".. came later after the beatles had broken the ground and shown what could be done.

The other thing about the Beatles was that they were popular enough that they could experiment and include a huge range of music styles. You say "some of it is crap". What it means is that their range of styles was wider then your range of taste.

Re:It depends

[wasted]

if you honestly believe you have a limited number of choices in styles of cars and music, you're just ignorant. there are hundreds of very different models of cars, trucks, vans, minivans, and SUV's, etc out there.

Although there are a large number of automobile makes and models, the choices are still somewhat limited. For instance, How many current car models are rear-wheel drive, two door, manual transmission, affordable, with a conservative appearance and seating for four or five? How many passenger vehicles are available (in the US, where I live,) with a turbo-diesel instead of gasoline engine?

And no, I don't listen to Pop. But that doesn't mean I am not aware of how the music business operates.

Re:It depends

[lessermilton]

Actually... they all look alike, and most of them perform alike - stock. If you shave[detnews.com] all the current cars... I'm guessing about 10 or 20 models you could tell who manufactured that vehicle. And I'm not referring to say the crossovers from GMC/Pontiac/Cheverolet/Cadillac, but referring to Toyota/Lexus/GM/Ford/Diamler-Chrysler/Kia, etc... And I'm pretty sure what he meant when he said music industry was referring to the radio/mega-mart's CDs, etc. blah blah. Not the little niche market stores/online retailers/XM/etc.

Re:It depends

[gordo3000]

being able to find non-pop music doesn't require a detective searching through masses of pop music. go to a virgin record store and go anymore but the pop sections. it's pretty damn straight forward. so straight forward in fact, I don't understand who you can be fooled unless your total exposure to music is MTV, VH1, and clear channel radio stations.

I doubt your a big guy into cars at all though. my neighbor who is a huge car fan(rebuilds old cars and shows them) can tell almost any car in the last god knows how long without trouble(wrecked, bare bones, or not). if you really feel every vehicle for sale in the US looks adn feels the same, then you are probably like me with wine. I'll only get it when absolutely required. but that doesn't mean there isn't a massive variety out there. to same a camry is similar to a jetta or a 3 series is just..... odd. the feel of each is incredibly different.

Re:It depends

[gordo3000]

I'm not sure, but if you are complaining about the variety because there is a single person out there that wants a turbo diesel with 2 doors, seating for 5, passanger vehicle with a very specific appearance(because I'm not sure what you mean by conservative, where I'm from, a ford truck would fill must of those) and a very tailored price range, sorry. Cars aren't custom made suits, get used to it.

In that instance, it is very easy to say that music is far more diverse. as there exists music out there for everyone.

btw, I'd bet volvo or VW makes a car that fits all your needs(though I'm not sure waht your definition is of affordable so....).

Re:It depends

[lessermilton]

Too many industries have decided that marketing means making the people want what we want to sell, instead of selling what the people want. That's exactly the problem. Those bins at your Virgin store, those aren't the advertised marketed music. And it's not the music we want to hear. It's the music that

that earn[s] the most margin. Not the music best suited for our tastes or needs. It's the car companies telling us to get an SUV when I'm almost certain that about 90% of those SUVs have never even been into a gravel parking lot!

Compare that with my Chevette that I took out on... well this road had 1-2' ruts in it. And yes, that's *feet*.

Believe it or not - neither the auto companies, nor the music overlords have our best interests in mind. Or our needs.

Singles let the Consumer Decide

[DavidD_CA]

The thing I like about singles is it lets the consumer decide. I can pay $10 for an entire album, or $1 for just the song(s) I want. The power is in the consumer's hands.

Most "albums" of today are simply a bunch of singles strung together. Very few tell a story. Hopefully though, this will inspire artists to create a more cohesive album when they feel so inclined.

A popular artist might be very successful releasing 10-15 singles, all independant of each other... or might decide to tell a story, write an album the "old fashioned way", and sell that instead. Or both.

Either way, this change in paradigm now opens up new avenues for artists and consumers.

I'd settle for either...

[rubberglove]

...if I could only find what I'm looking for.

The vast majority of the time, when there is a specific album I want to buy I have to hunt around and around for it.

This happens for the more obscure stuff, but also for some of the more popular artists. Last week I spent WAY too much time looking for the new Björk album.

It reminds me a bit of when I first started using bittorrent. There were no meta-meta torrent search engines, and no massive trackers. You had to look around at a lot of small (and sometimes unreliable) sites to try to get what you wanted.

Why so difficult? Because I'm not interested in buying any DRM infected music. It's not just an 'ethical' decision - it's a practical one. I've come to be in possession of 3 mp3 players: an iRiver h100, an iPod video and an new iPod nano. Two of those run rockbox, and the nano will the second it is supported. Having to run some software (i.e. iTunes or even the iPod-capable linux apps) to access my music just bugs me.

So, while I would gladly pay for convenience, very few sites want to offer it to me. Honestly, I'd even run iTunes in VMWare and use the iTunes store if I could get the music I want in an uncrippled format. I'd love to support their new DRM-free offerings, but I've never seen a single one! So what am I going to do, burn CDs?

I'm happy to spend money on music, but damn, it's not easy. Most of the time I just give up in the end and just get it from P2P. Does anyone have some good recommendations for non-DRM online music stores?

Note: I'm not going to bother with sketchy Russian sites that are technically legal, but pay no royalties to artists. I'd rather just get it for free in that case.

the real reason for the Music Industry's slump?

[night_flyer]

here's billboard's Top 10

1) Rihanna "Umbrella"
2) Shop Boyz "Party Like A Rock Star"
3) Fergie "Big Girls Don't Cry"
4) Plain White T's "Hey There Delilah"
5) T-Pain "Buy U A Drank (Shawty Snappin')"
6) Maroon 5 "Makes Me Wonder"
7) Avril Lavigne "Girlfriend"
8) Justin Timberlake "Summer Love"
9) Amy Winehouse "Rehab"
10) Fabolous "Make Me Better"

Re:the real reason for the Music Industry's slump?

[baal86]

I haven't heard of half of those artists and the other half I don't like! The rest of the world has weird taste in music (of course I couldn't possibly be the weird one)

Re:the real reason for the Music Industry's slump?

[Anonymous Coward]

um... do you have a torrent?

Re:the real reason for the Music Industry's slump?

[coredog64]

No torrents but Justin Timberlake might have something in a box for you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dmVU08zVpA

Self perpetuating business model...

[Tmack]

Duh? Why is this even news? Many music groups have one good song, and the rest of the album stinks. Most people that use the usual peer to peer networks download one song, and not entire albums. I perfer legal torrents because you get the album in just one convenient download. But I still perfer to buy my music in LP vinyl format.

The artist gets signed to the label for x number of albums. The band only makes a couple of good songs, so they either put one of each good song on two different albums or both on one and hope they can come up with more good songs for other albums later. The rest of the album they throw together whatever they can to pump out the album so they can meet their contract obligations. People buy (used to, at least..) the albums for the good song or two, for which they have to pay the full album price to get (again, not anymore), which makes more money for the labels (not the artist), which in turn writes more contracts based on number of albums since its more profitable that way...

And so the cycle continued until the MP3 came along, which made it much easier for people to get the one or two songs from the artist that are worth listening to, rather than pay the inflated price for > 80% crap. Now the labels are bitching because of this very reason, their big spinning wheel hit a big bump and got a hole knocked in it and isnt spinning so well anymore and they are yelling and blaming everyone in sight. People are more willing to download or buy single tracks online that take up only virtual space than collect more plastic coasters to stack on top of the rest of the empty CD cases. The labels are pissed because they can no longer pump albums out that are full of crap and expect them to sell well based on the one or two decent (if that) songs on them. Having the radios spew the good ones 10 times an hour until they are ingrained in everyone's head also doesnt help with sales of albums, because it only makes people want that song (if it doesnt drive them further away from it). Their wheel kept going straight and ran off road when the path turned and is breaking down because of it, yet they still refuse to change course.

Tm

ps: I know there are artists that can put together awesome albums out there still, but the newer "talents" the labels seem to be going after more and more these days are the pop-single one-hit-wonder type, in an attempt to make the quick buck. I would much rather buy an album by the likes of Pink Floyd, REM, STP or even Moby than try t piece one together from anything Ive heard on the radio of late.

Meteoric rise?

[Phanatic1a]

The industry should be paying closer attention to its meteoric rise

Meteors don't rise. They fall. "Meteoric rise" refers to something brief and transitory, like the track of a meteor which lasts for but a brief moment before disappearing; if you wish to say that a current seen trend is the way things are going to be for a while, "meteoric" is the opposite of what you should be calling it.

arcane? ARCANE?

[straponego]

You can't figure out how an album works? Do you mean archaic?

You know what's arcane, at least around here? Fucking dictionaries. Apparently.

As if the music wasn't bad enough

[ToasterTester]

The overprocessed formalized music is bad enough, but going to single only will really kill the music scene. LONG LIVE OLD SCHOOL!!!

A lot of groups initial releases wasn't their best material so the groups and the public will be losing the opportunity to hear those songs. Plus it was nice to hear a sampler of what a performer or group could do.

Instead of pushing for singles I would be pushing for more music and videos on CD's.

Madonna?

[absurdist]

MADONNA?!?!?!

One of the greats? Sweet merciful Christ.

At marketing, perhaps. But that doesn't indicate musical talent, sorry.

They tried once before

[michaelmalak]

3" CD-Singles were a big hit c. 1990, but the record industry killed them in order to sell more full-length CDs. Now it looks like they don't have a choice in the digital era but to sell singles.

Context

[Bobtree]

I don't buy singles, I buy albums. A great song is nice, but it's not worth much if the album is crap.

Music works best when it fits into a cohesive structure. My favorites are really series of albums that span a long carreer. For example, Boards of Canada, Mouse on Mars, and Squarepusher.

This year I've been listening to Freescha a lot, but more than singles, or highlight tracks, or even individual albums, I love listening to their entire catalog continuously in chronological order (perhaps including their Split EP with Casino vs Japan as a prelude or chaser).

Listener's experience

[ruinous]

I think a three and a half minute song has a lot less potential for creative expression than a full length LP. As a musician myself, I see individual songs on an album as being pretty much analogous to the movements of a symphony.

A good album/symphony should be greater than the sum of its parts, and the interplay between the various musical (or lyrical) ideas across the entire work is an important aspect of this. Taken by itself, a song or movement can still be a brilliant and enjoyable piece of music, but the subjective experience of the listener is entirely different.

I like albums.

[falconwolf]

I like albums too, my fav being "The White Album". What I'd really like is what he iTunes store does, it allows you to create your own album. Unfortunately it's digital whereas I prefer vinyl records. If I want to I can rip it to digital later.

Falcon

DJs

[Tweekster]

The only people i know that buy (and they download too, but they buy a hell of a lot) singles are DJs that spin them at clubs etc.

I cant believe success is judged by singles.
Albums are what they measure platinum records in

Re:DJs

[chord.wav]

It's common in the electronic music world to have a stack full of singles from people you never heard before, including, never-released or unedited songs. Or having 15 different mixes of the same song.
Because by the time the song is on an edited album and hits the streets, it's already old.

Oh and BTW, iTunes may rock when you have albums and coverflow is nice and cute. But it sucks when you have tons of singles each from a different artist.

Re:DJs

[Tweekster]

Agreed,

it is also useless for cue file/mp3 combos

Beatles

[falconwolf]

With some artists, like the Beatles for instance, I like their singles. Their good stuff was really good, but their bad stuff was, well, crap.

I prefer albums generally, but especially those the Beatles released. My fav is "The White Album". While some songs I don't particularly care for I can't recall any I'd call crap. Admittedly not every band released albums where most if not all the songs were good but some did, like Alabama and ZZTop.

They want everyone just to listen to the same pop crap they forcefeed us all, and if you don't like it, well, don't listen to anything at all.

Yeap, that's why about the only tyme I listen to the radio is while driving. I used to listen to the radio a lot at home however the station I listened to mostly had the music format changed on me. I mostly listened to Smooth Jazz. I especially like Norah Jones and Niko Case. Now however the radio format is more like pop, top 40s, now.

I may start buying albums, vinyl albums, now though. That I know of there are two stores that sell vinyl records near me, one five minutes walk and the other 15. I just need to get a new turntable to play records on. I almost went and bought one on impulse when I looked at one of the albums one of the stores had, I don't recall what it is now but it was by Roy Orbison and had a few really good songs on it like "(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay".

Falcon

Google is your friend

[vonFinkelstien]

Type ".99 pounds in USD" in your Google search bar.

genera preferences

[falconwolf]

When I was a teenager people either listened to "rock" music, "pop" music, or "punk" music.

Yea, it seems many if not most people are like that. Growing myself, I liked listening to different generas of music. Even now I like to listen to music from classical and classic rock to Zydeco.

Falcon

Re:Give consumers what they want!? Right...!

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, wanted to be treated fairly as a customer.

The "industry" only wanted to wring as much money out of me as possible.

Payola in the 60's (DJ's were underpaid, weren't they)
Payola in the 90's
      (the Execs turn ... and where was that price reduction after 10 years of illegal market manipulation?)
Buck-a-song pricing for DRM'd songs on Crippled, Channelized "MP3" players
      (the increased price gets me what... crappy quality in exchange for...?)
      More Buck-a-song pricing, even for the "filler" crap...
              (not that all else on an album is bad... I Like Alabum's)
Apple's "non-DRM" pricing, Oh! Look! It's "personalized" with my email address edited in. How nice...
      Apple's 30% higher pricing for the same quality I am used to on CD.

Yeah - I got what I wanted.... (Good & Hard!)

Riaaght!

    Good on EMI for their efforts to produce extended content Albums on CD/DVD
    Yes - I want the background info, photos, lyrics and art that used to be a standard on the good ol' album!

"... learning slowly but surely" ... My Ass!

Re:arcane? ARCANE?

[onemorechip]

No, dictionaries are archaic.

In reality..

[okinawa_hdr]

Good music defines music industry success.

One hit wonders

[falconwolf]

The people who will lose out on this model are the one-hit wonders. In my opinion, that simple change will improve the quality of music by quite a bit as it's no longer easy to get away with selling crap.

One hit wonders will either disappear, in which case the quality won't be improved, or they will create more hits, improving quality. It could go either way.

Falcon

I'm not sure if I agree, but

[heavygravity]

I like singles mostly because often (with the kind of music I like) I'll get some interesting mixes of the same tune that otherwise aren't released. For me, that makes singles especially attractive - in addition to full albums.

radio

[falconwolf]

Talking about "singles" indicates we're talking mostly about radio-play music and who the hell actually listens to that drivel?

I used to listen to radio a lot, that's how I learn about new artists and songs. For instance a few years ago I found a new radio station, well a station playing a new format at least, that played smooth jazz and I first heard Norah Jones on the station. Now I love her singing and have bought as well as have received as gifts some of her albums. If I never listened to the radio I never would have heard of her.

Radio isn't about to become crap. It is crap.

That really depends on what genera you like to listen to and what stations you listen to as well.

They would sell plenty of this, because people would need to re-build their library in the new format. Or replace a stolen collection. Or replace scratched or lost albums and discs. - Today? Just pull them off of your system backup. And no need to re-buy in a new format. I still have it in MP3 or OGG, thanks.

I used to do the analogue equivilent years ago. The first tyme I played a new vinyl record on my turntable I'd record it on my reel-to-reel tape deck. I'd then put the record away for safe storage and listen to the tape. I could do the same now, only add the steps of ripping and converting to ogg, wave, or whatever so I could take it with me when I go rollerblading.

Falcon

vinyl

[falconwolf]

Has any one else noticed that there has been an increase in Vinyl sales?

While I haven't seen vinyl in new stores, though I know of two small stores that have them, I have seen turntables in them. Such as in BestBuy. Some of them even have usb ports built in.

Falcon

I agree

[tjstork]

An album is a work of art as a whole, a sort of a modern symphony with multiple parts. Really, if the industry wants to save the album, it needs to let the artists be artists.

I would add Dylan to that list

[tjstork]

I mean, you really do need hear Dylan swaggering through Highway 61, or exploding through Blonde on Blonde. On a great album, it is as if each song is part of a larger tour, and the artist takes you to a number of places, and then ties all together as part of a larger, mysterous whole.

33 1/3, LPs, and EPs

[falconwolf]

the 33 1/3 LP format. With digital music, this concept is totally outdated and destined to die.

I hope not. I much prefer vinyl records over digital. However if I ever want digital I can easily rip and burn vinyl to digital. Recently I've seen new turntables in stores, some with usb ports built in. Even BestBuy has some turntables. I've been thinking of getting a new turntable myself but first I want to find a good one and make sure I can get stylus' for it as well as find a good reel-to-reel tape deck.

Falcon

Popular culture panders, film at eleven

[patio11]

Can you show me the Billboard Top 10 for any month in history that is just chock-full of talent, as opposed to being filled with well-marketed acts which happened to catch a passing fancy of the public? (Nothing categorically wrong with passing fancies, incidentally. I actually *like* Avril Lavigne in moderation. Not everything needs to be fine art, and fine art doesn't need to sell 10 million copies to be validated.)

Re:Popular culture panders, film at eleven

[slashdot.org]

Can you show me the Billboard Top 10 for any month in history that is just chock-full of talent, as opposed to being filled with well-marketed acts which happened to catch a passing fancy of the public?

although not really my taste, Dec. 20, 1969 might do:

No. 1, "Abbey Road," the Beatles
No. 2, "Led Zeppelin II," Led Zeppelin
No. 3, "Tom Jones Live in Las Vegas," Tom Jones
No. 4, "Green River," Creedence Clearwater Revival
No. 5, "Let It Bleed," the Rolling Stones
No. 6, "Santana," Santana
No. 7, "Puzzle People," the Temptations
No. 8, "Blood Sweat & Tears," Blood Sweat & Tears
No. 9, "Crosby, Stills & Nash," Crosby, Stills & Nash
No. 10, "Easy Rider" soundtrack (featuring the Byrds, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Steppenwolf)

This calls for a distinction...

[Genda]

The distinction is art vs. the music business. When you have some commodity band cranking out commercial crap like sausage singing to line the pockets of their corporate overlords, you'll typically find one or two tracks on an album worth even bothering with. For this reason being able to buy only what you want is a godsend. Of course the said corporate overlords can't justify the already rediculopus price for just two songs out of 20, even though they can't even give the other 18 away. So they finght tooth and nail to keep even the thinest rational alive for them to charge their customers everything the market will bear and far more (as we can now see by the steady decline of album sales.)

The true artists produce work which is impeccable, and I'll gladly own all their work whether it comes clumped as an album, or serially as a stream of singles. We need to enforce an social and legal environment that rewards innovation, and punishes stagation... not the other way around.

Correction...

[itsdapead]

Singles, Not Albums, Define Music Industry Success in the Singles Market

...there, fixed that for you.

In other news, "Cars, not Bicycles define Automobile Industry Success" and "Computers, not Mobile Phones define..." oh, wait...

Dilute the vote

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem is the ESPN viewers have as much say in the SciFi channel as you do (because they are bundled). If the SciFi channel were not subsidised you would have to pay more for your channel but you'd have a much bigger say: if they drop a popular show or keep a bad one going (Firefly vs ST:The Continuing Series) then threatening to leave KILLS them. Without it, they may risk a reduction in how much they can charge cable co's to include their stuff in a bundle.

Albums,Singles,Doesn't Matter

[flyneye]

The industry is an anacronism.
It's so over with they should just sell their stocks and run.
Music will never be over and we can distribute and promote for ourselves on a level playing field.
Just let it die.

Albums are obsolete

[jmyers]

Albums were a convenience. You could put on an album and listen to 20+ minutes of music without having to get up and flip the thing over. Then with 8 track tapes you could listen to the whole thing and not have to get up. The CDs, same thing. Sure you could have always made a mix tape on cassette or even 8-track and later CDs. But this was too much trouble for most people.

Most people just would buy albums and listen to them and when it was over pop on another one. Great albums were ones that had enough variety between the songs to not get boring. Some artists took real advantage of this format and made great lengthy listening experiences.

Now with the simple to use computer based programs like itunes for downloading music and making CDs and easy to use mp3 players the average person does not have to rely on albums and mix tapes are the new standard.

Also, albums are not dead and probably never will be. Artists that like to make albums will make them and sell them on CD or other format. Albums are just obsolete for the average user because the convenience of the format is not longer an issue.

So - what else is new

[DupleMeter]

Singles have always been the metric for music sale success. There was a heyday of album sales (and AOR based radio stations promoting & driving those sales), but what do the record companies expect when they promote singles on the airwaves, strong arm radio stations into playing only their approved cuts (thereby killing off any AOR based programing) and have all but crushed artist development, which leads to cohesive albums and artists with staying power in the first place.

I really find it humorous that record companies complain when they know, full well, they have dug their own graves through their greed. Yes, artist development costs money. Money that is not immediately recouped. But when that nurturing is well placed and you create an artist with a lifespan of 20+ years...and then they get their investment back in spades.

you know folks

[circletimessquare]

a little over a hundred years ago, there was no music industry. well, there was one in sheet music, and player piano rolls, but you get my drift: there is no article in the constitution or passage in the bible that states that we need a recorded music industry. society can actually function without one. shocking concept, i know

i'm being pedantic because so much of the hand wringing here seems to be about uncomfortable fundamental change. but i don't see what is so uncomfortable about it: the music industry is dying. frankly, why am i supposed to care or treat the issue with concern or on eggshells?

i discovered napster in 1999, and i haven't bought an album since then. i in fact have all 200 G of music i've downloaded since then, still sitting on an external hard drive. free music. lasting forever, easily accessible. much fucking superior to anythying the music industry can offer. every year, people like me are more and more legion. we don't need to mince our words folks here: there's no compelling reason to buy music again. ever

no, no half measures about people buying music for this retarded reason or that: the future is china, where everyone pirates, and artists make their money off of advertising and live gigs. believe it or not, people still like music in china. you have to say that because some strange people conflate the death of a bunch of middle men with the death of humanity's love for music. nothing is going to change. well, maybe there wuill be less crap pop without an industry to prop it up. oh dear, what a shame

as for all those middle men of the music industry? well i just don't understand the point. let them die. is there really anything else to say on the subject? shoud we discuss the fate of the cocktail napkins from last night's party too? there's nothing to talk about: it's over, they are history, trash

goodbye music industry, you're dead

Abbey Road

[I'm Don Giovanni]

You're missing out on some great stuff if you only indulge in individual songs over complete albums. Go listen to Abbey Road, which some consider the best Beatles album. It has three great singles, but much of the other songs consist of what you'd consider to be insignificant filler garbage (things like Mean Mr. Mustard, Polythene Pam, etc), and there's no way those songs would ever be released in a world without albums as they are unable to stand on their own. But when taken together and listened to in one sitting it's almost like you're listening to an opera.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbey_Road_(album)

You really want a world without even the possibility of such albums? Who cares if some albums are garbage sans one song? Do we eliminate all albums, even the great ones, to achieve a world where every song must be "hit" material in order to be released? We did have a world like that before the rise of the album, when the likes of Sinatra, Dean Martin, Anderews Sisters, Nat King Cole thrived. And they did put out great individual songs. But the album is the higher form of art; some use it to achieve greatness that wouldn't be possible within the confining limits of the "single", while others use it to peddle actual filler. The existence of great albums are worth the existence filler albums, IMO.

Too Late

[Prototerm]

the only music will be loud and obnoxious "LISTEN TO ME" stuff.

It's far too late to worry about that happening, it's already a done deal. The record companies remaster all the music they release so that it sounds like it would on the radio. Loud. Obnoxious. Crap. You want subtle? You want quality? Find some 30-year-old vinyl recordings. The music world ended when it went digital.

Nothing to listen to here, move along.

Taste is the Enemy of Creativity

[gary gunrack]

Singles are for philistines.

Thank you!

[Tony]

I was hoping someone else noticed this. I was going to post, but you saved me the trouble.

Except somebody marked you as "flamebait." So I had to post anyway, since I don't have mode points.

Re:Thank you!

[straponego]

Heh, oh well. I seldom flame people for grammar or spelling errors, but words... have meaning. It seems increasingly common for people to use similar-sounding words interchangeably. The less effectively we communicate, the dumber our species becomes.

If there is hope, it lies in the trolls...

They asked for it, they got it...

[hazydave]

This is a typical case of the music industry shooting themselves in the foot. The Album was the logical outcome of real artists gaining creative control over their music, soup to nuts. This began in the 60's with folks like the Beatles, Hendrix, etc. and continued. This sort of artist may not have huge megahits, but they more than likely have a dedicated following, many of whom will order their new works before even hearing them. I'll run out and buy a new Radiohead, Bright Eyes, Dave Matthews or R.E.M. album the day it hits the stoe shelves.

To reward this loyalty, the big labels have pushed their catalogs to favor Big Pop Hits. They've cut their catalogs and their artist rosters, and increasingly grown dependent on a smaller number of big hits. These are also largely corporate managed artists... producers write the songs, do the recordings, etc. and the artist is little more than an employee on a large project.

This works, of course, as long as the big labels can anticipate public taste.. which is why they're failing. They don't anticipate taste, they follow up a surprise hit with another dozen instant clones of that artist, probably with the same producers behind these works. Even for established "real" artists, the labels dictate release schedules... often leading to those albums with one or two good songs, the rest filler.

Both of these practices lead to the demand for singles... and this time around, the internet and Apple were there, at the right place, right time. I believe that a very large percentage of online sales are coming right out of album sales -- Pop fans get their instant gratification with an iTunes download, and they never really wanted the album anyway. Compilations like the "Now That's What I Call Music" series echo this... this was formerly the territory of bad direct-response ads on your local cheesy independent TV station; today, these CDs hit #1 pretty much every time... Pop fans know they get a handful of hits. They've been taught by the music industry, and their cartel with Big Radio, not to care about albums.

The only surprising thing at all is why The Big Labels are surprised about a drop in CD sales. After all, they've spent 10+ years engineering this very outcome. It may have been hastened beyond their liking by online sales, lead by Apple, and even a little by piracy (though in most cases, there's little evidence pirates actually would pay if they couldn't easily steal), but the conclusion was inevitable.

Re:Releasing as Singles Would Actually Help A Lot.

[hazydave]

This is EXACTLY the model used on radio... an album hits, and a "first single" is released. Forget about the fact there hasn't actually been a popular single format since the 45rpms of the 70s (there are CD singles, but people don't usually buy them, and most record stores only stock them spottily... I love 'em, because there are usually alternate takes, rarities, live cuts, etc on these from the bands that produce them), they still "release" a "single", which is what you hear on the radio. This has the interesting effect of having DJs yammer on about the "new single" from your favorite artist, 6-12 months after you bought the CD (on the day it came out).

But yeah, that's the model, and it's designed to spread the appeal of the CD/album... you'll get some people buying right away, others waiting to hear other cuts. Funny this is that, with digital downloading, there's little or no downside to waiting on an album purchase (though I rekon most downloaders are single fans anyway... why DL a crappy MP3 or AAC if you're paying for the whole CD anyway, and roughly the same price as a DL)... you just download the current hit, if you like it.

It's in this way the music industry is really cannibalizing their own CD sales, and that's why I agree that this is a "sea change" in the industry, and really going way beyond the relatively small (and debatable) effect of piracy.

Music as an industry

[CopaceticOpus]

The biggest problem with the music industry is that it is just not so useful anymore. We don't need big companies to find artists for us. We don't need them to fund album productions and promote artists. With the internet, there are many ways to distribute music cheaply and connect with fans. It is also much more feasible with modern technology for anyone to economically produce their own albums.

The music industry is desperately holding on, and working hard to promote bands based on image and creating a perception of what is cool. The overall effect on the music scene is negative. That's right, they're spending vast amounts of money, and we are worse off than if they didn't exist at all. Without the industry, music would have to become popular on account of being good rather than from being hyped.

Short Attention Span

[AvenNYC]

I wonder what percentage of people that enjoy full albums were brought up before the MTV Generations, etc... Attention spans are getting shorter - hell even in my nightclub the 'popular' crowds won't stick around unless 2 or more songs are being played at the same time on top of each other....

Learning all over again?

[necro2607]

Sounds like what they did with records in the 60's. Ever heard the term "B-side"? Back then you'd mostly only find singles by a band, one side (the "A" side) of the record being the main song featured for the single, and the other side (the "B" side) of the record being another probably-less-good song thrown in. These were usually always around $1 and sold well! Doesn't this sound really familiar? heh...

Singles suck

[VGfort]

Singles will get played on the radio constantly and if they become classics they will get played on the radio forever. Know I like to listen to singles to get an idea about a band and if they are good enough, I get the album. I really wish radio stations would play other songs on the album ("album filler" to some) by some good bands. Some of the songs that never get released as a single are very good and underrated. If you want your music collection to be nothing but top 40 hits I guess singles are ok :/

The Album Is Not Dead

[bandmassa]

The album is not dead, there will always be a place for it. As an economically practical means of delivering music with value for money for the consumer and label it no longer applies, and for ditties and pop, the single is a good way to go, but there is always a place for collections of related songs. Seriously, do these clowns who say the album is dead also say the musical is? Does a true Pink Floyd fan love Shine On You Crazy Diamond, but hate the rest of the album? How would you take a Magical Mystery Tour without an album? This is just more record label hype dressed up as "serving the market". I live in a golden age, yet I'm surrounded by fools!