The album, the single, and inertia

In "The Album is Dead," Mark Cuban wonders:

So the question arises, why don't artists serialize the release of songs ? Why not create a "season" of release of songs, much like the fall TV season and promise fans that Flo Rida is going to release a new single every week or 2 weeks for the next 10 weeks ?

Whenever discussions like this arise, there's always the school of thought holding that most albums only have one or two decent songs anyway. This theme is presumably a close cousin to "all current music is crap" (i.e., they just don't make music like when I was a kid).

However, there's another school of thought. As this comment notes: "Currently, those who only purchase individual songs, rather than entire albums, are missing many lesser known gems, and are missing the cohesive experience of an entire album."

We can  come up with examples where this is clearly the case. Pink Floyd's The Wall, The Who's Tommy, and so forth. However, it seems a stretch to call the vast majority of albums out there as being particularly cohesive. In fact, to the degree that there's excessive sameness within a single album I tend to see that as a bug rather than a feature.

It's worth noting that the album is far more a creation of technology and custom than of art. Columbia produced the first 12-inch, 33 1/3 RPM vinyl "long playing" record in 1948. (According to Wikipedia, the term "album" relates to the fact that the relatively short 78 RPM records that preceded LPs were kept in a book "album.") Although 45 RPM singles (in particular) were popular during the 1950s and early 1960s--such singles generally had a "hit" on the A-side and a less popular song on the B-side--LPs continued to define a great deal about how music was released. Even cassettes and CDs didn't change things much as these new formats adopted about the same capacity as the LP. As Kees Immink wrote in the Journal of the AES:

The disk diameter is a very basic parameter, because it relates to playing time. All parameters then have to be traded off to optimise playing time and reliability. The decision was made by the top brass of Philips. 'Compact Cassette was a great success', they said, 'we don't think CD should be much larger'. As it was, we made CD 0.5 cm larger yielding 12 cm. (There were all sorts of stories about it having something to do with the length of Beethoven's 9th Symphony and so on, but you should not believe them.)

In other words, whenever the industry has come up with a new format it has almost always stuck with roughly the same playing length.

There are many lessons here for IT and other businesses. For one thing, there's backward compatibility. The industry wanted to reissue LPs onto cassettes and CDs without having to routinely use multiple of them for a single album. In practice, you rarely get to start with a clean slate. The digital realm finally banishes the physical aspect of backward compatibility. No longer is there any technical reason to favor selling any particular size of song bundle.

However, there are more subtle types of inertia. Whole sets of practices from booking studio time, to promotion, to going on tour have grown up around the chunk of music that is the album. On the other hand, the nature of digital distribution--and the flat-pricing scheme that Apple has fought for successfully (even though it doesn't really make economic sense)--tend to drive us towards hits-driven downloads, Long Tail notwithstanding.

I don't know if a scheme like Mark's would work. However, it's increasingly hard to see a traditional album format making sense in a world where it's got no physical reason to exist. If we move away from albums, perhaps we have to recreate "B-sides" or other mechanisms that encourage the sort or serendipitous discovery that the album has brought us over the years.

[MyRightEye]

Marc Cuban and other musicians should look into Open Source Track.

From their front page...

Welcome to the Open Source Track (OST) initiative

OST is about bringing freedom of creativity to musicians and their music. The artist of an OST track has agreed to make some or all of their tracks open source, or at a greatly reduced copyright control. This means that not only can you download the fully produced track for free, but the track's written score, guitar tab charts and the pre-mixed individual instrument tracks. OST tracks may be used for any non-commerical purpose without additional license. The artist retains the copyright to their music, and still collects royalties if the song is used commercially. Live performance of OST tracks does not count as commercial use.

Budding musicians can forget about sidestepping around copyright issues when swapping music and guitar tabs by using OST tracks. OST tracks may be performed live, remixed and freely distributed, and derivatives of OST tracks may be used in your own compositions.

http://OpenSourceTrack.com

[M C]

Let's modify this sentence:

Currently, those who only purchase individual songs, rather than entire albums, are missing many lesser known gems, and are missing the cohesive experience of an entire GOOD album.

Let's face it, the album's death began with the boy-bands and Britney movement in the late 90s, continued through the likes of Nickelback and Fall Out Boy and today's hundreds of ringtone-oriented hip-hop artists. Their music is made single by single, and none of these artists could sustain 60 minutes of decent music if they were forced to by the Saw dude.

And let's also face it: even today, once someone finds an artist they REALLY like on a sustained basis, they buy (or steal) as many songs as they can. Such artists are simply fewer and farther between now.

The 70s had album-oriented radio that basically led you by the nose to the artists who cared about every song. Those stations (and that whole paradigm) died in the video era, when the song got hoisted above the album.

Really, the "era of the album" in pop music was brief: from approximately the mid-60s to the mid-80s, and one's boomer-ness shows when one laments that relatively short era.

We've simply returned to where pop music was in the 50s: make a couple of singles, then stick random product around it and let the record company's promo machine sell it on the back of your hits.

The only exception here, as always: indie artists. Just another reason to develop decent musical taste.

[ghaff]

MC:
I think there's some truth in what you say. Without passing judgment on the elusive "quality" metric, it's fair that we had a period when there was a more explicit album orientation even outside of concept albums and the like. However, I'd argue that even in the ~1965 through ~1985 period there were still plenty of good songs that weren't necessarily part of a cohesively good album. Certainly there are plenty of songs from that era that, today, I enjoy listening to individually rather than listening to the entire original album.

[Darbalu]

I find it amusing that Mark Cuban can say that the "album is dead". It's a statement meant to shock and provoke a conversation. There will still be a market for long play albums long after popular tastes shift from singles to albums to whatever new formats develop. The fact is that many artists excel at putting together fantastic albums and some artists struggle to fit 12 to 14 songs together. If the up and coming artists that the major labels throw at us decide to go with another format, there will be just as many or more artists who attempt to preserve the album. It's not a matter of if the album is dead but instead what percent of the market share does it represent? It reminds me of pronouncements that vinyl was dead after the CD came around. Audiophiles kept purchasing and now we see a growth in sales amongst the new batch of kids... not so dead is it?

Also Mark's "idea" of a season of song releases sounds a lot like Jonathan Coulton's "Thing a week" where he released a new song each week for a year on his podcast. The songs were actually really good despite the tight schedule.