Bottom Of The Barrel

The slow death of the album

Is the end near for full length cd's [albums if you prefer] or record companies for that matter? Well probably no on both counts but change is on the horizon. Beck recently stated in an article in Wired Magazine "Artists can and should approach making an album as an opportunity" to create an album that "the listener can participate in or arrange and change." He went on to say "It's time for the album to embrace the technology." I think Mr. Beck is on to something - is it Mr. Beck or just Beck? I'm always confused by people with one name, but I digress.

Record sales are down and have been on the slide ever since the invention of Napster [and all of its successors] and the digital music marketplace is on the rise with iTunes, Rhapsody and [the reinvented] Napster. Additionally consumers are becoming very picky about what they buy, namely they can now buy individual tracks instead of the entire album. We have all bought a cd based on a single song heard on the radio and been disappointed to find that was the only good song on the whole disk. Well in the new digital millennium, we are no longer faced with this problem and in fact this may well influence how music is created and released in the future.

Artist may soon learn that putting together a 10 to 12 track cd with only 4 really good songs is counter productive and they may actually be losing money, using the time value of money theory. Why hold back those "good" songs from the digital markets [which want to buy tracks anyway] in order to create a whole cd with "filler" tracks that are less likely to sell. I say get the good music on the market sooner rather than later and forget the whole cd thing. Let the consumer decide what constitutes a disk; they are already doing this by buying single tracks and loading them into their MP3 players with custom play lists.

Record companies may also be taking on a new role in the coming years. Artist now have free online tools such as MySpace or YouTube to get their music out there and create their own buzz. MySpace, now owned by the News Corporation, boasts more than 100 million registered users and is one most popular site on the entire internet. They recently announced that they are launching a music store later this year, through which any of the estimated three million musicians who use MySpace will be able to sell their songs and CDs directly to their fans. YouTube, another wildly popular destination on the web, has been used to distribute music videos and recently used to "launch" the band OK Go into the mainstream. OK go released a low-budget video for the single "Here It Goes Again" on the site on July 31, and became a prime example of how fast word-of-mouth about an act can spread in the age of viral video - 5.5 million views of this video alone!

Beck added that "Record labels definitely aren't going to go away, but it'll be really interesting to see how their role changes." I tend to agree [again] that they won't disappear all together but they will need to adapt to the digital age just like everyone is [take a look at Blockbuster or Circuit City as examples] or be left in the preverbal binary dust.

So partly thanks to Shawn Fanning and Steve Jobs, the traditional album and record company maybe heading toward the great cd case in the sky. Not to worry though, maybe 8-tracks will make a comeback and stop all of this MP3 madness. Well maybe not.

posted by TheWino @ 9:43 AM