The Album is dead, long live the Album?
Posted in Petulance on August 12th, 2009 by Alex
This may be a “sure we all knew about this Alex, we were just keeping it a secret from you” moment, but it came as a surprise for me that there are no less than 2 rich digital media formats being touted to reinvigorate the ‘dying’ album format.
I hadn’t realised that the album had was dying – I still buy but most of my music either on CD or download whole albums. However much of the rest of the music buying world doesn’t – the trend is towards buying single tracks, and some bands have even opted to become singles only zones and eschew albums all together. After all, what’s the point of recording an entire, well packaged, sonically aligned collection, when most folks only ever download track 9 because they heard it on the radio?
It is for this reason that AC/DC refuse resolutely to (officially) release their music on digital format – we record albums, they say, not single tracks, and they’re made to be consumed that way. It’s not hard to see why they, and many other bands, feel this way.
The album frequently marks an epoch in time. “Here are 10 songs that represent this moment in our lives”, a distillation of their microcosmic zeitgeist if you will. All the best albums are comprised of tracks that feel like they really belong together, and they wouldn’t have sounded right on the previous or subsequent album. A poor album is often one that doesn’t gel. These are often albums made up of a mix of ‘singles’ or filler, and it’s perhaps these types of albums that no-one it mourning the death of.
Many albums are aligned on theme (Muse’s Absolution), tone and style (Death’s Sound of Perseverance, anything by Earth) and concept (Leviathan, Seventh Son of a Seventh Son), not to mention countless other configurations (try Flora by Chord for a rather obscure one). Even the track ordering is, for many bands, considered a fine art – Radiohead nearly split up over the ordering of OK Computer!
Some of the best albums released recently have been exactly that: albums, not just collections of good tunes. People downloading single tracks from Mastodon’s concept masterpiece Crack in the Skye surely miss the point and musch it’s beauty and power. Opeth’s Watershed and Baroness’s Red Album may not be ‘concept albums’, but the tracks belong together – they gel.
And it’s not all about the music. CD packaging is getting better and better and vinyl is still going strong. Putting together an album isn’t about recording a bunch of tracks, batching them up and putting them out, it’s an art form in itself, and one that many bands and fans alike still care deeply about.
So who thinks the album is dead? The bean counters of the record industry, that’s who.
The idea of repackaging the music download is not a bad one. The download market is one that never really lent itself to the album, and if people want to download an album, I can’t see any problem with making it a richer more rewarding experience for them. Packaging video, cover art, lyrics and (oh dear god no!) ringtones with the music is a way to help extend the album artform, and replace some of the value of the music that is lost in translation to download.
However, this whiffs of a cynical ploy by the music industry to sell more downloads to recoup revenues since those dastardly, party smashing plebeians, the public decided that they wanted freedom to download music however they damn well want. Given this motive it has the potential to pervert and cheapen the album art form out of recognition.
This is perhaps a moot point, as do people really want or need this? CD sales may be declining, but this is merely a symptom of the passive music fans who never really wanted whole albums anyway, but were forced to buy them, moving to another format. CD’s and vinyl are still the format of choice for real music fans. Given that music is now easily exchanged, bands are forced to put out much higher quality packaging and extras which, over time will become more valuable, collectable and will be truly cherished by fans in the way that these formats used to be.
So is the album format dead? Hell no, It’s stronger than ever!
(If you need any evidence that the CD Album format is alive and well check this out)
I think digital artwork would work best on a portable devices that have screens set up to handle that. It’d be nice to be able to flick through lyrics and liner notes whilst on a train to work listening to music. Really this is just moving the CD Extra idea over to digital download so it is really nothing new.