The Dying Album

Welcome back, blog. I hope my poetry didn't make you feel used. I'm back with things to say.

Starting with:

The sales numbers from 2007 paint a gloomy picture for the music industry. According to an article dated January 10th in “The Economist,” music industry giants like EMI are concerned that the money the industry can count on from paid digital music downloads in coming years is not enough to keep the industry afloat through unprecedented drops in physical CD sales. However, the digital music revolution has another more important casualty: the album itself.

What our generation needs to ask itself is what the purpose of music will be in the digital age. If music exists only to entertain, then so be it. Carry on, Soulja Boy. But if music exists to respond to and ultimately alter our society, as I like to think it does, then the album is the forum for that dialogue, not the single.

The truly great musicians of the 20th century were separated from the commercial flash-in-pans by their ability to write cohesive and influential albums. Take, for example, The Beatles. Imagine for a moment that John, Paul, George and Ringo had retired to the English countryside to count their riches after their Help! album and before Rubber Soul. They would have been written into pop-culture lore much the way contemporaries like The Dave Clark Five and The Monkees were. Instead, they began basing their albums around the idea that the music industry can make a statement with albums while also selling singles, and as a result they became (arguably) the most influential band in (arguably) the most influential decade in the history of music.

Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, U2's The Joshua Tree. These are the albums that helped make mainstream music a medium of social change rather than a form of escapism. Since the early 1980’s, specifically with the release of Def Leppard’s Hysteria, the single has taken over the most innovative and experimental parts of music, making the 1990’s a sea of decent singles on mediocre or downright bad albums (with a few glimmering exceptions like Jeff Buckley’s Grace and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill). Alternative’s focus on the single and the rise of hip-hop as the dominant genre on the radio waves have given the music industry a license to stop finding musicians capable of writing the next great album.

Even hip-hop, which for better or for worse has always been a singles industry, has its definitive albums. The artists that changed the game in hip-hop did so not just with brilliant hooks but with powerful concepts extended into albums (see first: Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back). There isn’t a single genre in music that hasn’t been subject to the album’s power to drive movements. The album gives an artist a broad canvass on which to leave their mark, while the single is bogged down and distorted by marketability, music-videos and merchandising.

Part of the problem exists in the way iTunes and other download services have changed the consumer. For the casual music listener, the ability to buy good singles for $0.99 is a major money-saver (especially today, when hardly any mainstream artists are putting out entire albums of good material). Consumers are apt to assume that the extra $8 they would spend to own the entire album is a waste. However, without any consumer interest in the album, what motivation do the record labels have to encourage artists to write sophisticated albums?
As an example of this problem I take Justin Timberlake's release in 2007, FutureSex/Love Sounds. The singles from this album were generally of a higher quality than the songs that surrounded them on the radio at the time. "Sexyback" and "My Love" had a fresh and innovative sound that showed a new level of maturity in both JT's songwriting and Timbaland's production, and "What Goes Around Comes Around," although more predictable and effectively ruined by its half-rap-half-song third act, nevertheless was of a unique hue that made it tolerable. Even I was excited about the release of the album. In fact, it was the first album I actually purchased from the iTunes store. However, the album that enveloped those singles is comparatively weak. It is full of annoying and stagnant songs that each drag out a minute longer than they need to. Also, despite his commendable efforts in the singles, the rest of the album exposed JT as a mediocre and at times intolerably bad lyricist. Although lots of iTunes customers bought the full album, it probably taught a lot of them that buying the entire album is usually not worth it (as it did for me with regards to modern R&B).

My question is: where is the next great album going to come from? Sure there are underground rappers that have written great albums in the last few years (Madvillain, Mos Def, Dead Prez, etc.) but many of those albums are still based around the idea that a few good singles can be extended into an album by adding skits and other fillers. I would argue that less mainstream music has given us some great albums in recent years as well (Death Cab For Cutie's Transatlanticism, Stars' Nightsongs, Imogen Heap's Speak For Yourself, Radiohead's...well...everything Radiohead), but because of the nature of the industry none of these albums have reached the level of sales that the great bands of the 20th century did.

In order to further illustrate that the album is dying, I want to go back to The Beatles and back to the hypothetical. Let's pretend The Beatles were trying to market The White Album as new music in today's musical culture. In order to do this we have to suspend our disbelief a lot, since it is doubtful that any of the songs that were huge from The White Album in the late 1960's would be popular on today's radio, but that's why this is a hypothetical. The Beatles released "Hey Jude" as a single from the White Album sessions, but it wasn't on the album. In fact, "Hey Jude" wasn't on any album. It's b-side was the popular version of "Revolution," a slower version of which appears on the second half of the second disc of The White Album. Those singles would have been bought up in massive numbers in the iTunes store as they received radio play all over the country, and perhaps some consumers would have loved the songs enough to anxiously await the release of the album. However, what are the odds that today's music fans would pay more than $20 for the 30-track complete 2-disc album?

I think the sales of The White Album would have been significantly lower in today's market. In fact, there is a good possibility that the project would not exist in its 30-track form and instead would have been divided into several releases, or that consumers would be content with not owning the songs they had not heard on the radio or through word-of-mouth distribution. Can you imagine a world in which Beatles fans did not own a copy of "Blackbird"? What about songs like "Dear Prudence" and "Martha, My Dear"? I shudder at the thought.

Of course, I am leaving out factors like The Beatles immense popularity before The White Album's release and the incredible success of "Hey Jude" as a single, but the fact remains that the techniques used today would have greatly hindered the distribution of the project.
I want to believe that if record executives were presented with a body of work as brilliant as The White Album, they would find a way to get the music heard, even if it meant compromising some of the marketing principles that the digital music revolution is based on. I just can't be sure that they would make that effort when money is so readily available in the business of recycling abysmal pop.

I see the inevitable result of this shift being a singles culture that is irreversibly based on image and immediate satisfaction; an culture where danceability takes precedence over intelligent songwriting; a culture that no longer aims to find the next Brian Wilson, Jimi Hendrix or Marvin Gaye but rather is content to find the next pretty face to superimpose on the same old beats.

The album is being replaced as the primary vehicle for music distribution, and I believe that its demise will make music of quality much harder to come by, especially in genres like progressive rock that are traditionally album-based. It will be up to our generation to find a way to a) keep the album alive by encouraging artists like Radiohead that break free of major-label standards and find their own means of distribution, or b) find a way to perpetuate innovation and experimentation in music without the use of the album.


Until next time.