The Future of the Album

With the advent of iTunes and other online music stores, where consumers have the option of buying a single song or a whole album, the way people think about music has completely changed.

As these online stores started to catch on, before the CD really started become outdated, I remember thinking that this would be the end of buying mediocre albums to get a couple great songs. In the pop music explosion of the turn of the century, it seemed like such technology might actually force artists who relied on singles to generate album sales to rethink their entire approach. Those were heady, idealistic days.

Obviously the technology hasn't forced any changes in the pop world, and if anything, it's only exacerbated it, by adding not only ringtones-as-revenue-stream, but also allowing major labels to generate enough money off of the sales of singles that they can pump out more singles surrounded by careless, mediocre albums, and still make money.

Maybe I'm just old enough to still think about music in an album format. Sure, I love a good mix CD, and that's my preferred means of consumption in most cases, but I still, for the most part, will only financially support artists who take the time to put together a complete project.

What got me thinking about this was this article from Hypebot about the end of the album as a tool for musical categorization.

Unfortunately, they are probably right. Future generations will move toward buying more and more single songs, and ever fewer albums. I find that reality a little sad.

Obviously our attention spans in the digital age are growing increasingly shorter, but the album represents something much deeper than just how music is packaged, at least in an ideal sense. An album should be a whole work, like a painting, while a song is a single subject in a crowded scene, and each instrument the brushstrokes. If artists only work to create lone songs, as catchy as possible, than the music looses a level of meaning.

Take Pink Floyd's The Wall for example. If they were to release that today, sure "Another Brick in the Wall" and "Mother" would probably sell like hot cakes online (if kids still actually listened to that style of music). And while those are great songs, they lose a level of meaning without the context of the album.

And that's what it really comes down to, at least for me, is the issue of context. Sure you can love a great line of poetry, but doesn't that line mean more within the context of the rest of the poem. It's like reading a book of selected quotations and then thinking you understand the philosophical tenants of Nietzsche.

The end of the album signifies a further subjugation of the artist at the hands of the record industry. It's not about what you create, or what you want to express, it's about selling catchy songs to people who only care about feeling like they are on TV while walking down the streets listening to an iPod playlist.

Your thoughts?