Changes

As if in response to my final statement in the last entry, The New York Times published an article today in its Business section called "The Album, a Commodity in Disfavor." The article essentially outlines a trend that anyone who has been paying attention to the music industry already sees: the gradual replacement of the album as the primary unit of music sales by the single.

Here is the link to the article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/business/media/26music.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th

First of all, from a consumer's perspective, the album has been a "commodity in disfavor" for a while now, particularly in the rap and R&B arenas. Overall, the only reason that the album was ever important in pop music was as a vehicle for one or two popular songs. Powerful and influential pop albums are anomalies in the fairly steady flow of mediocre albums highlighted by one or two important singles. You can count on your fingers and toes the number of pop albums that sold millions of copies because of their power as a whole rather than because they have a lot of great individual songs on them.

Classic rock is a different story. There are great albums in classic rock, albums like "Led Zeppelin IV" and "Tommy," that are revered simultaneously as vehicles of classic anthems like "Stairway to Heaven" and "Pinball Wizard" and as needledrop masterworks that secured their creators' musical immortality. There is a reason, however, why pop artists like Simon & Garfunkel and James Taylor became demigods without writing anthems. They managed to write great songs for the radio, like "Cecelia" and "Country Road" and then surround those songs on their albums with comparable and sometimes superior pieces of music like "The Boxer" and "Fire and Rain." It is no surprise that while the singles made these artists famous, the albums are what made them rich.

From what I've seen, the average listener has been aching for a way to easily buy one or two songs by pop artists rather than buying their entire album for decades. The only thing that has changed is that Apple has suddenly facilitated that desire by creating iTunes and making it completely unnecessary to pay for Nelly Furtado's "Loose" just to hear that awesome synthesizer in "Promiscuous." (...Thank God)

Aside: Can anyone name a truly great R&B album that came after "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill?" I'm not an expert and am in some ways talking out of my ass, but I can't see any evidence that anyone in mainstream rap and R&B is trying to make that next great album. (For me, the jury is still out on John Legend, but he should keep up the good work.)

The industry is just as focused on singles as they have always been, but now artists who can't write more than one or two great hooks are going to disappear quickly. Once a single is successful, an artist has to match it almost immediately before it leaves the charts in order to convince even a small percentage of listeners to buy the album. This creates what is, to me, the most frustrating part of pop music: two singles from one artist that sound exactly the same.

Case in point: The Fray. "How to Save a Life" is a decent album, filled with fairly standard but at times poignant lyrics and a refreshingly rich piano-rock sound. The singles are "Cablecar (Over my Head)" and "How to Save a Life." Their chord progressions are, for all intents and purposes, the same. The vocals are in the same range in the lead singer's voice, the piano is less than inventive and the drum intros and outros are essentially identical in both songs. I was extremely disappointed when I heard "How to Save a Life" after absolutely loving "Cablecar." To me it feels like "How to Save a Life" was released to give the listeners who bought "Cablecar" as a single but were reluctant to buy the album a second reason to bite the bullet, but in the process it cheapened the experience of "Cablecar" by showing that The Fray aren't stupendous songwriters.

Don't even get me started on Nickelback, who wrote one song that I liked and then wrote that same song 6 more times and counting. Grrrrrr.

So I suppose my conclusion is that I agree with The New York Times' assessment of the state of the music industry (which is good because it wasn't an opinion article but a report).

However, I draw hope from artists like John Mayer, who's album "Continuum" I have been quick to recommend to anyone who will listen. He has taken a step out of the acoustic, playful, soft, raspy soul-searching that he has done so far (with great success) and has written a richer, deeper, more soulful album, with minimalist songs that speak to his generation without presuming to have everything figured out. He has already shown that he is a creative and highly skilled acoustic guitarist, but until this album he has used that skill to flirt with his female fanbase and to playfully flit around the edges of deep and real emotion. On this album the electric guitar is his means of emoting more truthfully. The guitar does not dominate or justify the songs but instead provides them with the spirit and truth that words are not exact enough to express. To you doubters who have hated him ever since you couldn't understand all of the lyrics of "Your Body is a Wonderland" because his voice was so raspy, I once was one of you! I recommend that you listen carefully to "Gravity," then listen to "Vultures," then listen to "Stop this Train," then listen to "Slow Dancing in a Burning Room." I think those will be enough at least to change your perspective on John Mayer even if it doesn't make you a fan.

I don't think the album will go extinct anytime soon as long as there are intelligent songwriters and musicians who don't want to settle for careers on the singles charts. Every time the music industry has a doomsday theory, some band or artist steps up. Examples include U2's "Joshua Tree," Jeff Buckley's "Grace," Nirvana's "Nevermind," Paul Simon's "Graceland" and R.E.M.'s "Murmur." There is still a lot of good music out there and there are still a lot of people that don't base their taste in music on what they hear on G105. If the past is any indication, all you need are smart listeners and smart musicians.

"I watch the ripples change their size/But never leave the stream/Of warm impermanence and/So the days float through my eyes/But still the days seem the same/And these children that you spit on/As they try to change their worlds/Are immune to your consultations/They're quite aware of what they're going through. Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes."