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

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.

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.