Mark Cuban thinks 'the album is dead'-- I hope he's wrong
From the earliest days of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s up through the early 1960s, kids bought "45s."
The albums of the period typically had just a few good tunes, and the rest was crap. Then The Beatles changed the rules. Their albums were so chock-full of great stuff, you wanted to hear every tune. Sure, singles were still important, but most of the bands that mattered didn't rely on singles, and even The Beatles stopped putting out singles tied to a specific album (there were no singles released from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band).
(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg)
I agree with one thing in Mark Cuban's "The Album is Dead" post--that the major labels and music business have a lot to answer for--but rushing to embrace the commoditization of music won't create an environment for artists to thrive.
Cuban's musings--"Consumers are buying music one track at a time. I think people will pay 99 cents to get a single rather than steal it. I think people would rather steal a full album rather than pay 10 dollars or more for it."-- may turn out to be true, but ultimately, we'll all be the poorer for it.
You oldsters may remember that in the '60s, albums sold for $3 to $5, which is a lot more than $20 in 2008 dollars. No one was whining that music was too expensive 40 years ago, and movie ticket prices in the '60s were $1 to $2.
If you applied the same pricing ratio to movie ticket/albums prices, CDs would be closer to $30 today. The ever-escalating price inflation of baseball, football, basketball, and Broadway show tickets are now many multiples of CD prices.
For some reason, people no longer want to pay for recorded music, but millions of Led Zeppelin fans would have happily paid big bucks for tickets for their recent London show.
"The Album is Dead" mantra surely isn't true yet. Witness Radiohead's In Rainbows and the Magnetic Fields' Distortion: these albums aren't merely slapped-together assortments of songs; no, they're cohesive works.
Mark Cuban is a businessman. He clearly knows how to make a buck, but if he was a big shot in the music business in 1966, The Beach Boys would have stuck with singles and never made Pet Sounds.
The "album," a collection of songs, goes back decades before the LP, to when multidisc sets of 78rpm records were popular. The discs were inserted in "pages" of the album, hence the name.
Sure, the LP vinyl record and CD are still referred to as albums, but according to Wikipedia, the album is almost 100 years old. For something to last that long, you'd have to hope it must have some intrinsic value.
Steve Guttenberg is a frequent contributor to magazines and Web sites including Home Entertainment, Playback, and Ultimate AV. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
At least back then there were more decent songs on an album than today. These days you get one to two songs while the rest is filler. It's just another way the entertainment companies show their greed.
I believe you should have both options to buy in singles or one-click for an album...but album only choices will hurt sales as consumers will look for other methods not so legal to download the one or two songs they want.
I agree with Cuban that albums should die for the majority of pop acts. Both the performers and fans are better served through serial releases. The songs are often stand alone and it allows changes to be made based on feedback from the market.
He also said that newspapers should be charging more than they currently do ... with their diminishing subscriber base that makes a lot of sense.
The guy's an idiot.
Sure - I'll pat that much - if (and only if) you give me something of comparable quality to the Beatles or Led Zep.
Lets not fool ourselves here. There are two distinct possibilities when it comes to the sales decline of music (and of movies for that matter): 1. People are indeed stealing media rather than paying for it, and 2. Sales volume has declined in direct relation to a decline in quality.
Studios are trying to put out the fires of declining sales with the gasoline of many mediocre albums. It would seem prudent to try producing better (rather than just more) albums to get the most out of each. The rest of the industrial world has been moving towards a logistics based cost cutting orientation for years. Remind me of the reason that record execs should be exempt and maybe I'll start shelling out $30 an album - until then.....
- Dave
My hope is that people see the complete albums that are out there for what they are and pay for those.
http://OpenSourceTrack.com
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.
- by Scryer_360 January 31, 2008 3:53 PM PST
- The real problem that no one understands is that its not that the album is dead, or that people want to pirate everything, or that its just "kids these days." The sole blame for music sales decline resides with the executives, not with the consumer.
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(13 Comments)Back in the late 50s everyone bought vinyl because THAT WAS ALL THAT IS AVAILABLE. What happened the second the more portable tapes came out? People bought those, then CDs. Today, people want it even more compact and with even more music on one device, ala the mp3 player. What executives do not understand was that even back when tapes first came out, people would copy those onto other tapes (I did it). So its not a modern invention that people would make copies.
Why do people make copies? Certainly there is the free side of it but dammit, I made copies of tapes back in the 80s, and I knew quite a few people in New Jersey who sold pirated cassettes. The real reason is usability: today for some reason you do not find albums full of music you want to listen to, like the Beatles, and music has become sort of a commodity rather than an art. Bad artist voice? Cover it up with auto-tune, executives say. Poor stage performances? Don't give out a tour. And worse, executives have conformed to the idea of "types" artists: that this artist is urban only, that this rap star can't cross-over and do a pop album.
Rihanna is a great example: early on she just did mello, but now she is firmly cemented as an "urban" artist. Even her early pop was more "urban," and by that I mean, lets face it, her executives thought she would only sell with black audiences. They never realized that white people, latinos and asians would like her too, and today her appearances and performances are all rolled into rap and r&b fests, even though her sound is decidely pop. The fact she sells well in Europe is no clue to these executives. She could easily wow a stage of teenagers and tour right along side of say, Avril Lavigne. But no, her executives do not see this. She quite easily fit right in with Fall Out Boy during the VMA's, but no, executives say "your 'urban,' you don't have pop appeal." Right....
And like this article says, executives have made sure that cohesive works in an album are dead. You do not get albums like "In Rainbows" anywhere anymore, it seems, sans the lucky release. Its mainly because execs have adopted the idea of the hit single, where they can sell one disk with one (maybe two) songs on it for $4.99. This is what blew up Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys in the late nineties considering most of the album was crap, and executives never moved past it. To this day, the whole push of the record industry is to get kids to buy those singles discs.
Nevermind that iTunes introduced us all to the idea of 99 cent downloads. That blew away the record industries idea of singles discs, which they thought was a profit barrel. But what they don't understand is that someone would take that singles disc, rip it to their computer and then put it on Napster or Kazaa. Ever wonder why only the singles ever show up on file share sites? Because the people who do that were brought up by executive's ever so intelligent marketing that singles were better than albums.
Artists are not interested in doing albums anymore because executives choose artists based on who could sell singles.The few who do want to do albums are usually denied. Kanye West was one of the few last year to get something out even resembling an album.
And then they decide they are so afraid of the average consumer they load DRM into everything. This means that now, its more attractive to download illegally for people who would have never downloaded anything, because the stuff they get from Kazaa has no DRM on it.
Executives have messed with album production until its a shame. Executives have destroyed the idea of an artist controlling what they want to do by throwing and then forcing an artist into one genre. Executives have messed up the pricing by simply denying times are changing. Its the Executives fault if the music industry is in trouble, and no one else's.
esterud: what the hell are you talking about? Making a custom CD takes, seconds. A playlist is just point and click different songs into place before everyone gets there, and then make it repeat once they arrive.