Comments on: Mark Cuban thinks 'the album is dead'-- I hope he's wrong

The Audiophiliac says "The Album is Dead" mantra surely isn't true yet. Some albums aren't merely slapped-together assortments of songs but rather cohesive works.

[MaLvaDo39]

The album won't entirely die, but it is an old bundling technic that made you buy more than you really wanted.

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.

[cbibbs]

I'm not sure the mystical 'back then' to which you refer. It must have been before the Monkees were the top selling band of 1967. Trust me, there's plenty of filler on the best selling albums from that year (not the best, just the best selling).

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.

[Computer_Audiophile]

If Mark Cuban says the album is dead he must have a lot of money in a competing product. He doesn't talk without having money in something.

[Aeirlys]

I always buy full albums, for a couple reasons. I don't buy music from artists that can't put together a full album of good songs. I find that even with my favorite artists, there are songs on an album that I may not like the first time around, but that grow on me in the context of the compilation. Albums may be dead in the pop world where vocalists don't choose or write their own material, but I think in any genre where the focus is as much on composition as performance the album will survive.

[atmuscarella]

Music is like everything else in the entertainment world, it is competing for people's time and money. How many albums/CDs can a person buy before they couldn't possibly listen to their music collection? I am 50 years old and have been adding 10-15 albums/CDs to my collection for years. At this point I sometimes get a new CD and only listen to it once and have actually purchased CDs that I haven't had time to listen to for several months after I bought them. At some point new music will not be worth purchasing. Music isn't the only entertainment media with this problem the same is true for books, moves, TV etc., there will come a time when a young person can spend their whole life reading, listening to, or watching used/old media. The thing that music has going for it is live concerts - I am guessing that bands that do well touring will do well with album/CD sales.

[drew30319]

Yeah - Mark Cuban also said "only a moron would buy YouTube."

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.

[markrob35]

This has way less to do with downloading and way more to do with the type of product output by artists (many of whom do it under major label pressure). Decent albums, a la The Beatles, are still out there; they're just rare. I found this blog entry to be a bit telling: http://wesleyspengler.wordpress.com/2007/08/06/epic-albums-revisited/

[stads185]

I have to take issue with the suggestion that "If you applied the same pricing ratio to movie ticket/albums prices, CDs would be closer to $30 today". (I agree with markrob35)

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

[stads185]

I also think that the "album is dead" comment refers to the predominance of artists looking for single songs to be hits rather than having an album as a complete work of art. The mp3 has indeed done that to our culture. Those who make complete albums rather than single songs have become somewhat of a fringe entity.

My hope is that people see the complete albums that are out there for what they are and pay for those.

[aquaadverse]

I'm pretty sure you're going to get a lot comments from folks that weren't around for concept albums like Dark Side Of The Moon, Quadraphonia or Physical Graffiti. Clear Channel and their ilk has homogenized the media, American Idol and knockoffs have made the Bolton-slaughter style of singing desirable. There's still a lot of good indie themed albums around, but I'll wager an attention ***** like Cuban can't find it.

[esterud]

Music is a social thing too. When you're at a BBQ or party it is easier to throw in an industry-made album by an artist people are familiar with. Then people can experience songs they are unfamiliar with by an artist they enjoy. An adult will likely not have an abundance of free time to make custom CDs or custom playlists. Also hooking up a portable media player can be cumbersome, and guests may not know how to use it. It's always fun for the guests to be able to go through a cabinet full of CDs they can touch and see and pick then to use an electronic device to find what they want. Some people live in a bubble.

[MyRightEye]

Mark Cuban should look at Open Source Track.

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.

[Scryer_360]

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.

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.