Mediacology

The Album, a Commodity in Disfavor - New York Times:

Last year, digital singles outsold plastic CD’s for the first time. So far this year, sales of digital songs have risen 54 percent, to roughly 189 million units, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan. Digital album sales are rising at a slightly faster pace, but buyers of digital music are purchasing singles over albums by a margin of 19 to 1.

If you grew up with LPs then you may remember that record covers had many utilitarian values, such as seed sorting and for organizing other loose biological material. With CDs we lost that handy cardboard storage device and alas have not found too much to do with a jewell case, but the concept of a record changed in some ways for the better. It became a 70 minute set-piece rather than two divided sides. Perhaps the best example to take advantage of this was Radiohead’s OK Computer which is the most perfect stream of an hour plus of music as you will ever hear in a lifetime.

Now the NYTimes reports that we may be witnessing the death of the album format altogether due to the popularity of song downloads. Maybe so. As a subscriber to eMusic.com (note ad on the right sidebar, hint hint) I behave both ways. Usually I get turned on by a song I hear through streaming radio, my favorite being KEXP and KCRW. I then go to see if eMusic has it, and if so, I click through the album. If there are three or more songs that sound promising, I download the whole thing because as a musician I prefer the whole album concept and assume the artist does too and there is a logic to the group of songs that are collected in the “album.”

Incidentally, if you are a bit of an album geek, you should read the 33 1/3 book series. It’s a bunch of short books about classic albums. You can get started with “33 1/3 Greatest Hits, Volume One (33 1/3)”, and then move onto one of the many, Erik Davis’ Led Zep IV being one of the best.

(Here’s a nice little article about the series from the Chicago Trib)

Technorati Tags: 33 1/3