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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."
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.
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!
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)
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
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).
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
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."
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.
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...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.
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"
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
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:
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.
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.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
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".
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.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
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.
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