Matt says, in his Thoughts for the Week:
iTunes is killing music. I love that you can find pretty much EVERYTHING you want, but track by track purchasing leads to too many shitty singles (”My Humps”! Fergie isn’t even HOT). While I admit to purchasing some real bad music (every heard of the rap group “Dirty”?), the album format is a great thing. The best tracks are rarely the singles, and part of the fun is listening several times to find your favorite tracks. Is there any incentive anymore to make a damn album?
In a word? No. Just no. To the whole thing.
Here’s why.
Consider your average 12 song album. If you let everyone listen to the whole thing, there would be popular tracks and unpopular ones. If we consider this alone, it seems like there’d be no incentive for artists to put out anything but the most popular tracks. But that’s just not how it works. Because even those unpopular tracks would have fans, and those unpopular tracks would sell. (I also disagree with the notion that there’s such thing as a ‘best track’ on an album as anything but strictly subjective)
In the “Albums Only” world, it’s all or nothing. You have to decide if the X songs you like are worth paying for the whole album. Basic econ tells us that there will be a group of people (maybe a large group) for whom the answer here will be “no” and they will spend nothing and get nothing. In this little world there’s also a huge overpayment for one-hit-wonders, allowing them to steal the spotlight (and a larger portion of finite music-buy monies) from artists who have the potential to be more popular overall.
Enter iTunes.
Now you buy what you like. If you like one song, buy one song. If you like three, buy three. Whatever.
Yes, fewer people are buying the whole album, but two things are happening: 1) more different people are buying a band’s music and 2) the band is getting valuable feedback about what tracks are popular and selling. All of this is mitigated by homogenized radio which can easily sway what people want to hear and buy, but that effect will shrink as people start looking to iTunes (and others) to find new music.
Now, is there an incentive to put out whole albums? Of course there is.
I’d imagine that some artists work better if they’re putting together an album. They will still have an incentive to work that way. There’s also the incentive that albums are generally cheaper than buying the tracks individually, so you might entice someone to download ALL of your music for an album as opposed to just 1/2 of the songs.
There’s also the studio time / touring aspect — bands are more likely to rent large blocks of studio time and go toss down a handful of tracks all at once as opposed to hitting the studio every 2 months for a new individual song.
And, FYI, some folks still buy CDs.
What iTunes is finally allowing is for the free market to work its magic on INDIVIDUAL SONGS not just albums. It also lets new artists gain a little foothold by selling their music a little at a time, and most “___ is killing music” arguments that I’ve heard are aimed at Big Radio for shutting out the little artist who doesn’t want to fall in line. That’s where iTunes (and similar) are fantastic and are really going to improve the availability of musical diversity.
February 1st, 2006 at 12:36 am
hey, i don’t think we know each other, but everyone seems to link your blog, so i feel like i know you better than you know yourself. Anyway, your post peaked my interest, and i want to quit stalking you.
I mostly agree with you. Music was never meant to be as album centric as it is. Elvis, “teeny bopper Beatles” and Motown all made their very signficant existences on 4 track singles.
Enter the “Album Beatles,” a handful of LPs so mindblowingly good, record companies have been forcing their artists to try to immitate the one in a million efforts for 30 years.
That, on top of the fact that with CDs it became far more economical to pump out a full length rather than a $6 CD single, we stuck with albums full of filler. iTunes nicely solves this economic barrier, and also forceably solves forced albums problem as well.
However, i felt like you were implying albums as a whole were on the way out, which can’t be further from the truth. Albums are still relevant, not only as art, but to create diversity in the first place. I’m a bit partial, because i mostly buy albums. As a listener, all the agreeably “great albums” of our pop-culture life time weren’t necessarly empirically good, but they were signifcant.
It’s lately been fab to say Nirvana wasn’t really the cats pajamas, cause they weren’t, but they were significant as all hell. But it took a whole album to get that point across. It’s like you may be able to make a really good first impression on a girl, but you have to reasonably back it up and show off your personality (or whatever)… you don’t get lucky on a pick-up line.
You can’t create a new sound with one song, and you can’t inspire future artists without actually making a good album.
i just said entirely too much, but i could keep going … be careful i’ll try to buy you a drink sometime and keep debating..
February 1st, 2006 at 2:17 am
As someone not involved in iTunes or any other such thing, I have to agree with Pete and Dan here about the continued need for CDs. And not just because I don’t use iTunes. Sadly, though, the CDs available of late–to my knowledge–have been getting shorter in length and giving the consumer less for the money.
Do you guys (and gals) think there is any connection involved, or have you noticed any other changes lately?
February 1st, 2006 at 7:40 am
Dan, I certainly didn’t mean to imply that albums were on the way out, I totally agree with you about that — but I think iTunes might help to make the albums better.
February 1st, 2006 at 9:20 am
Music was never meant to be as album centric as it is.
Right, just like movies were never meant to have sound. What does this even mean?
That, on top of the fact that with CDs it became far more economical to pump out a full length rather than a $6 CD single, we stuck with albums full of filler.
I don’t think it’s any more economical to produce a full length CD - in fact, given how cheap it is to make a CD and how expensive it is to use recording studios and such, I would bet that it’s chepaer to sell 4 tracks for $6 ($1.50/track) than it is to sell 12 tracks for $12 ($1/track). Besides, how would this argument not apply to cassettes, 8-tracks, or LPs?
…stuff about Nirvana…
How snobbish. If I didn’t have class soon, I think I could argue that if Nirvana had never done anything except release “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” they’d have been just as influential.
Besides, for all the uber-influential album artists you can list (Beatles, Stones, Springsteen, Zepplin, whatever), I can name just as many uber-influential non-album artists (Elvis, Buddy Holly, Lousi Armstrong, Aretha, whatever) and then we’re just left with the obvious point that some musicians are going to be influential (Beethoven) and some aren’t (Toni Basil) no matter whether they put out an album or not.
And in response to Valerie, I think you’ll notice that people were levying the same complaint long before Napster, much less iTunes.
February 1st, 2006 at 9:36 am
Though I’m def. out of my depth, I would imagine production costs to be fixed on a per-song basis, so looking at just that it’d seem not to matter at all whether you sold full albums, EPs, or singles… but I find it hard to rule out that there might be some economy of scale to be gaied from producing more than one track at a time.
There’s also CD manufacturing whose overhead costs are probably tiny when distributed over that many CDs, but certainly adds a bit economy to full albums, but I’d suppose the big one would be flowing the CDs through the distribution chain, design work (for the CD, liner), and promotional work which would certainly start to add up if major artists were only putting out singles.
The flip-side, of course, is that for smaller artists, the studio time is the limiting element, so you see a lot more EPs and such out of new artists while they’re trying to get a big label behind them.
But I think the strongest pro-album argument is that artists/bands, with the possible exception of Hootie and the Blowfish, do not sound identical from song to song and if they didn’t put out alubms (or at least EPs) you would be forced to judge a band’s sound by one song.
February 1st, 2006 at 1:50 pm
NB -
I didn’t mean for the nirvana thing to come off as snobby as it was, it was late and it was the first thing i could think of. But my point is that “hey ya” and outkast are just as good whether you bought the double album or ripped off the single, but the market was ready for it. If you want to change directions, you need something to sink your teeth into and really get people worked into a frenzy over.
There are lots of great singles artists, but the ones you mentioned are pretty much pre or co-beatles, which was kinda my point. albums aren’t for everyone, so no need to force it.
would you rather drop $6 on four songs (one possibly being a remix of one of the others) or $11 for the whole album? Thats my economic argument.
February 1st, 2006 at 4:56 pm
Well, to answer your last question first, it depends on how good the album/single is. If only the single is good, then I only want the single - and I’ll go to iTunes for it, thank you very much. If the whole album is good (good being subjective, of course), then I’d rather buy the whole album. Even if the album is cheaper “per song,” if the songs aren’t worth buying, then they’re not worth buying.
And all my examples of influential singles-artists do (almost necessarily) predate the Beatles because, as you pointed out, the Beatles did change everything. My argument may not have been clear - it is simply that no matter what format music is mass-marketed in, there will be influential artists. If we swing back from an album oriented music scene to an indie-EP or even iTunes-single oriented scene, or even if we find something wholly different, there will still be massively influential artists who will leave huge impressions on the music world as a whole. (Mozart and Bach weren’t the only composers of their generation, you know?)
All that said: I really like good, coherent albums. Not just a collection of 8-14 songs; there’s nothing particularly special about that to me, even if they’re 8-14 really good songs. (Like, for instance, Automatic for the People by R.E.M. - it’s not coherent at all, but it’s all good music, in my opinion.) What I’m talking about is an album that tells a story; Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen, The Stranger by Billy Joel, and Welcome Interstate Managers by Fountains of Wayne all come to mind. They’re not just collections of songs, to me… They’re just chapters in rockin’-ass books.