The Demise of the Album?

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 00:55:50 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall <jhall () astron berkeley edu>
> Subject: The Demise of the Album?
> X-X-Sender: jhall@irk
> To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>, Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
>
>
>
> (via JD Lasica... http://www.jdlasica.com/blog/ )
>
> Dave, Declan, An exceptional piece that explores an interesing
> point... I must admit, I've taken to queueing up all of my digital
> library at once and letting it play on random repeat. -Joe
>
> ---
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/weekinreview/20PARE.html
>
> What Albums Join Together, Everyone Tears Asunder
> By JON PARELES
> July 20, 2003
>
> The pop album made its way through the 20th century by staying
> adaptable, transforming itself from analog grooves to digital bits.
> But can the notion of an album  a collection of songs sold as a single
> unit, to be heard in a certain sequence  survive the Internet?
>
> That question has been raised more insistently since Apple Computers
> started its iTunes store, where songs can be downloaded for 99 cents
> and complete albums for $9.99. Apple recently announced that 6.5
> million songs have been downloaded since the store opened on April 28,
> fewer than half of them as part of albums. Its competition, Buy.com's
> buymusic.com, is expected to announce its opening on Tuesday, selling
> downloads for the much more widely used Windows operating system.
>
> With less hoopla, music retailers like Amazon and Tower Records are
> already selling individual songs to be downloaded, dismantling the
> albums they came from. Subscription services like Pressplay, MusicNet
> and Rhapsody also offer individual songs. And then there are the
> millions of unauthorized copies of songs bouncing around the Internet
> on networks like KaZaA, which continue to flourish despite the
> Recording Industry Association of America's threats to sue users.
>
> With so many unattached songs to choose from, listeners are becoming
> disc jockeys, or perhaps file jockeys. In the 1980's heyday of the
> cassette, many dedicated music fans made mix tapes, spending hours
> choosing just the right succession of songs and taping them one by
> one. But mix-tape methodology is now everywhere. With a few clicks,
> multitudes of more casual listeners sift through the songs on their
> hard drives, burning their own compilations onto homemade CD's or
> creating playlists for their Ipods or the software players on their
> computers.
>
> Even within an album, the programming features of CD's have long
> allowed listeners to skip or shuffle songs at whim. "Younger listeners
> don't listen through an album," said Val Azzoli, the co-chairman of
> the Atlantic Group. "Maybe they listen to track 1, track 3 and track
> 8."
>
> While computer commerce and short attention spans are working against
> the survival of the album, there is, of course, resistance. Metallica,
> Radiohead, Led Zeppelin, the Beastie Boys and others have refused to
> sell their music through iTunes because Apple insists on making all
> songs available separately. They see their albums, not separate songs,
> as the artistic unit.
>
> "We like to see our work released in that collective form that we've
> created it in and have always created our work in and grew up in,"
> said Lars Ulrich, Metallica's drummer and songwriter. "It's about an
> experience that's 40 or 50 or 60 minutes long. It was always about how
> those songs fit together: the fast song next to the slow song next to
> the crunchy one next to the ballad next to the instrumental. There was
> a balance, and you had all these dynamics within the experience. I
> like the relentlessness of it, to really pummel and torture people
> with it as long as possible."
>
> The album as art form took time to develop. The first albums were
> cumbersome stacks of three-minute discs, played at 78 r.p.m., in
> sleeves bound together like photo albums. They evolved by the 1950's
> into the 12-inch, 33 1/3-r.p.m. microgroove LP. But until the 1960's,
> singles were the staples of the recording business. Radio stations
> played 45's and jukeboxes were stocked with them. Listeners of a
> certain age can remember saving up allowance money to buy a 45 single
> for less than a dollar.
>
> For many, it was their first purchase of recorded music.
>
> But since the 1960's, the money has been in albums, which have a much
> higher profit margin than singles. And while there have always been
> albums that surrounded a hit single or two with filler, more ambitious
> musicians began trying to make every song on an album worthwhile.
>
> Time is the raw material of music, and as technology provided more of
> it, musicians exploited the extra minutes. Fans sat down to
> contemplate album covers and scrutinize lyrics for rock operas like
> the Kinks' "Arthur" and the Who's "Tommy," and concept albums like the
> Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" and the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts
> Club Band." One concept album, Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon,"
> lingered in the Billboard Top 200 for 591 consecutive weeks.
>
> Yet the success of album sales, for better or worse, has usually
> depended on the promotion of one song at a time  through the singles
> heard on the radio or later, the tunes turned into video clips for
> MTV. Major labels largely phased out the sale of singles, however, in
> hopes that fans would buy an entire album  a tactic that caused
> short-term gains and long-term resentment. Then along came Napster in
> 1999.
>
> [...]
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/weekinreview/20PARE.html
>
>
>
> (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is
> distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior
> interest in receiving the included information for research and
> educational purposes.)
>
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> Joseph Lorenzo Hall
> Graduate Student                        http://pobox.com/~joehall

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