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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."
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.
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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.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
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.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
"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.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
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.
sic transit gloria mundi
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
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
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.)