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Underground > Radio & Music >

The End of the Album??

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09:55 / 04.12.06

The chart rule changes in the UK on Jan 1st, means that anyone can release a song and get to number #1 without the traditional baggage associated with releasing a single. (you won't need a physical cd in the shops, like you do now, for download sales to count).

It also means that when an album is released...all the songs are 'singles' as opposed to how it is now, where the label sits around and decides which tracks should go to p&d as singles.

What it means for independent labels is gold dust.

Majors will still be able to market and promote the bejeezus out of their pop releases, but, I think we'll see more and more independents and non-pop acts appearing in the singles charts. Which is good, because the web has been taken over by conglomerates. Friends & listen counts mean nothing, it's too easy now to spam/hype an artist and key bloggers take payola style back handers so the single charts as a rough guide to what's really popular comes into it's own. It's beginning to mean something again, after years suffocating under the weight of over promotion.

On the flip side, people who buy music downloads prefer to buy 12 of their favourite songs from 4 albums rather than buying 1 album. It's pretty much the end of the old music business model..which was release an album and a clutter of singles to promote the album every few years. It's also pretty much the end of the album as a concept...

What say you?

14:18 / 04.12.06

i think the album sized release was only ever a convenience - the biggest size that could be practically reproduced with the available tech.
if records had had more room i imagine we would have seen longer albums; likewise if they held less we would have seen shorter ones.

i think what is happening now is a result of both the lifting of that restriction and of the way in which music was marketed through the latter half of the 20th century.

singles have been jingles for the albums they appear on for a while, and for the most part the buying public has seemed quite happy to go along with that. the only downside has been that often the lure, the single, is of a quality far above the rest of the material.

i like the sugababes, but i have deleted chunks of their album output after putting the CDs on my PC. some album tracks are great, but for me the majority of their backcatalogue is nothing like as exciting as their singles.

i think it's sometimes kinda like watching a trailer for a movie and then shelling out for the film, only to realise that the trailer really was everything worth watching without all the dross in between.

i think there are still some acts for whom the album is a work rather than a collecion of works, but that seems to be on the wane as well, perhaps as artists realise that their work is being consumed in those smaller chunks and compose or perfrom to that end.

14:51 / 04.12.06

I think the idea of buying 12 of your favourite tracks from a bunch of albums is a pretty flawed and sad way of going about things. Surely, if you like a band enough to get a bunch of their songs, you should get the album. You never know if you'll like the album tracks, so they're at least worth a listen, the listener will miss out on an awful lot of great music. This idea also suggests that the listener would know the songs already, but I hardly ever buy an album where I know more than one or two of the songs (and I more often will pick up a record having heard nothing at all on it, by the strength of recommendations of previous work).

I think this idea works fine for singles-based pop bands but starts to fall apart when you think about bands, like toksik mentioned, where the album is the best medium to really appreciate. I think the 'track here, track there' approach is certainly not for me. My obsessive tendencies mean that if I like a band, I'll want to buy all their stuff and the album is the best way to do this still.

And, on delivery systems like iTunes, it's still cheaper with a lot of albums and singles to buy it as a whole if you think you're going to like it.

Maybe this is just me being old fashioned though, and not wanting to let go of my treasured concept of an 'album' (preferably a 45 minute one, but 70 minutes is also a good length for an adventurous work). I would miss it if they disappeared to be replaced by 'tracks'.

15:11 / 04.12.06

i don't think it'll disappear.
i think you'll just getless emphasis on it as 'the' length of work.

i mean, there really is no reason why you couldnt release a three hour memory card or flash stick album.
robbie williams released an album on memory card and has done deals with mobile companies to release things through phone friendly formats, and other releases on reusable flash stick are already appearing, like keane's latest.

the 'standard' size will not go, it just won't be standard anymore. bands who need to make an hour long piece of work will still be able to, and fans who want that will still drive that market.

one plus side is that you will no doubt soon be able to get a continuous version of the ring cycle, or whatever other CD-busting shit you like.

it's a relaease from the restrictions of the old technology i reckon, rather than a loss.

15:28 / 04.12.06

I think the idea of buying 12 of your favourite tracks from a bunch of albums is a pretty flawed and sad way of going about things.

that really depends.
i like a lot of pop, but i also like my music to fit one thread of mood. i often find pop albums do too many styles and moods on one album for me. if i want jump up, i want jump up.i dont want a mellow RnB ballad about lost love and vocal acrobatics in the middle.

like, i listen to the nouvelle vague album as a whole, but i dont listen to rihanna in the same way. i no longer clutter my PC with the tracks i never listen to.

i find a lot of dance artists are similar.
i am always impressed when this isnt the case(leftfield, laurent garnier and chris clark all have albums i like as albums), but i find that in general i'm picking and choosing.

album length works came to primacy in the era of guitar bands, so i think many of them are more comfortable with making those.
i think a lot of modern pop and dance is made by and for the children of DJ culture, and so the emphasis is often more on the tunes than artists or albums.
some older pop was all about radio singles, and you can see that reflected in stuff like martha and the vandellas. songs with an instant appeal on albums with little or no thread to them ere common in motown.

so yeah.
depends.
it depends on what style of music you like, and what you nedd the music for.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

15:46 / 04.12.06

I'm not sure when the last time was that I bought a single, but I suspect it was one of the last few single releases from the first Scissor Sisters album. When the rules were changed in the mid-nineties so as to dissuade bands from making it worth my while to buy a single I slowly stopped buying so many. These days I rely on hearing music I like from blogs, radio or occasional browsing of music TV and then looking for a website or a torrent to give me an idea of an album.

Singles are dead. But I think albums are still here for a while yet. I believe iTunes UK is extremely moribund? It's only if the UK phonographic industry start legislating limits on how much music you can have on an album then there will be a danger of them following singles. I'm not sure that there's any good evidence to show that the declining sales of music have anything to do with Teh Pirates!!1! rather than stupid behaviour on the part of record companies.

18:16 / 04.12.06

Albums are unnatural. They've only been around since the 1930s or 40s. Before that, you kept your singles in actual albums, like photographs or trading cards. That's where the word comes from.

20:51 / 04.12.06

I think albums are a good length of time, and are really useful by dint of their convenience rather than anything else. If you really like a and you'll want to listen to more than one song in a row, but you won't want to listen all afternoon, so 45-70 minutes is usually a good length. And, most bands that I listen too will usually have a cohesive 'feel' to an album, and I respect their artistic ambition and will want to listen to the work as a whole. Heck, I don't even use shuffle, or skip songs most of the time (there is one Smashing Pumpkins song, La Deux Machina, that I make an exception for. It's awful)

I take your point, re: picking and choosing, toksik, but where I differ is that if I find I don't like the majority, or even around a quarter, of an artist's output, I usually won't bother with them at all. I'm an all or nothing kinda guy, I suppose, but I often find that if a band drops a bad album or an album full of filler it'll turn me off the rest of their material too, or I at least won't bother with the one or two songs on the record that are any good.

21:19 / 04.12.06

yeah, but it isnt always 'bad' songs or filler, it's often just that they arent doing your thing for atrack or two.

for example, manowar do a great version of the william tell overture, but some of my friends find it hideously pretentious to have a bass solo like that on a metal album.
the band didnt drop that out of laziness, folly, or anything so negative. i imagine they thought, as i do, that it is a great piece of music and one entirely suited to a Metal(\m/) version.
have a listen and see what i (or my friends, i guess) mean.

i think albums are usually just collections of songs.
sometimes they are lined up to purposefully evoke a greater picture, but mostly they are just a snapshot of all of an act's ideas at the time. i think the latter is way more common, excepting perhaps within prog rock circles.

All Acting Regiment

13:46 / 05.12.06

It would be interesting to see a band basing their recorded output around a series of singles with no real albums as such.

18:53 / 05.12.06

Legba: I like doing that with singles. Back in the 90's when nearly every band made 2 CD set singles (4 b-sides!!), I used to love getting the b-sides together and making an album out of them, sequencing them to provide the best order in an album context. Great fun, and I have many B-side albums that I consider to be better than the main albums they accompany.

I think bands should definitely play with this idea some more, releasing three or four eps, and that's your album. I think Ben Folds did this recently, didn't he? Although with this model, you lose the cool bonus!!1! factor you get with making your own B-side albums.

18:55 / 05.12.06

Oops, misunderstood what you meant there slightly. I was angling towards the idea that the fans would create their own album-length works from the singles, but I guess that shows how much my mind is shunted towards an album as the best way to appreciate a band's output.

Kiltartan Cross

07:14 / 06.12.06

There may be something more to the default "album" length of an hour or thereabouts; it's (very roughly) equivalent to slightly under your average rock/indie/(ish) band's live set. A "new" band's first album will often be a very fair approximation to their entire live set; someone buying it is buying pretty much what they'd hear if they went to see the band live.

Only broadly applicable; at a rough guess the limiting factors for live performance are:
1) There needs to be a decent amount of material to satisfy the audience but not bore them to tears and shoegazing.
2) The artists need to be alive at the end of it.
3) Support costs (venue costs) need to be at some (highly variable) optimum level which fits whatever the audience have free to spend.

I'd guess all of these combine to reinforce the ~1 1/2 to 2 hours music default for live performance, which in turn reinforces the ~1 hour album standard.

Personally speaking, I fear the possible trend towards an "every song is a single" system will remove some diversity, or shape the mainstream to a more competitive "every song must have 'single' qualities" direction. Yuck, but hey, who can say?

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08:19 / 06.12.06

Way-ull...

Possibly not the best example, and I'm no fan myself, but Ryan Adams has just released 11 albums worth of material under various psuedonym's on his website.

DJ Reggie - Holla Dayz Inn
The Shit -Christmas Apocalypse
DJ Reggie - A Reginald Gangster
DJ Reggie - Hip HopBreaker
DJ Reggie -4:20/20
The Shit - This Is Shit
The Shit - ...Hits The Fans
The Shit - Hillbilly Joel
The Shit - General Ulysees S. Hospital
The Shit - Slef Portrait
WereWolph - Feel The Laser

Fair enough, many of the songs are under 1 minute long and some will, quite rightly I think, argue that many should have stayed in the studio and never seen the light of day, but, I'd at least applaud the principle of someone like that who actually behaves like a musician, prolifically writing and releasing new music, rather than the a+r'd to hell, must-be-commercial-or-forget-it treacle of *only* releasing 1 album every two years with singles promotion every couple of months to plug it...

It's interesting times. It could, potentially, also go the way of one-hit-wonder labels or conveyor belt hitmaking factories like Motown, Tin Pan Alley, SAW, Murlyn etc.

Or both, of course.

12:28 / 06.12.06

A "new" band's first album will often be a very fair approximation to their entire live set; someone buying it is buying pretty much what they'd hear if they went to see the band live

i know of several bands playing shorter than album length sets. they'll probably release an album when they get enough material, but i think 'enough' is about the expectation among most music fans(including the band members themselves) that an album to be about ten songs, lasting between half an hour and an hour.
some bands also play sets that are much longer than that.

most bands don't include the covers they do live on their albums either.
some do different versions of stuff they do live for the release, like the chemical brothers reimagining of tomorrow never knows.

i dont think the album and the live show necessarily match up, although they often do at least partially.

Kiltartan Cross

17:24 / 06.12.06

I think it's definitely more pronounced the less well-established a band is, though, but yeah, there's a hell of a lot of variation, it's hardly a hard and fast rule. Although there is the "band X, touring to promote their new album" style of gig - band X plays new album material interspersed with greatest hits. It's not entirely the tail wagging the dog; I guess it comes down to how much new material the band are putting out in a certain time, and I'd hazard a guess that the average amount lends itself very neatly to the "album every year or so" figure; but only the average.

I suppose we could look at the overall situation from the listener's end; I'd guess many people are listening to recorded music a lot more often now than they would have been, say, twenty years ago, due to the proliferation of digital technology. There's a large amount of recorded music wanted, so to speak. Perhaps the net result will be a shallowing (if that's a word) of the musical pool; if the same proportion of songs produced are good enough, or catchy enough, whatever to be singles - or the future equivalent, there'd need to be more bands to fill the demand. At the cost of less income per band from recorded music. Or perhaps the expectation of singles will simply change to become closer to what today is expected of an album track. Personally I'd prefer to see that; I worry (%in my capacity as heroic defender of music%) that if people are being encouraged to prefer catchy "glorious pop songs" instead of, ah, sampling the full range of a band's output then they're gonna miss out.

13:13 / 12.12.06

I think the idea of buying 12 of your favourite tracks from a bunch of albums is a pretty flawed and sad way of going about things. Surely, if you like a band enough to get a bunch of their songs, you should get the album.

I couldn't disagree more. I remember when I was a kid, it was a big deal to drive 30 minutes to the nearest music store to spend my hard-earned allowance on a CD. Often, I didn't know the band, I had just heard a song or two and decided I might like more of their stuff. Then I came home with the CD in my hands, so excited to open it up and listen to it. Only to find that it had two good songs, and the rest were a)bad or b)remixes of their other work. I was horribly dissappointed. I was very excited about things like napster because now I could actually find out if an album was worth listening to before I ran out and bought it. Which I still do, from time to time.

i think the album sized release was only ever a convenience - the biggest size that could be practically reproduced with the available tech.

Again, I disagree. Many albums contain ten songs for a length of 40-50 mins. One of the good side effects of the internet is that this seems to be a discontinuing trend. My recent purchases have included between 15-20 tracks and a full hour's worth of listening.

i think there are still some acts for whom the album is a work rather than a collecion of works I agree. This is one of the reasons I think the album will still be around for the next 30 years. The other reason is simple - consumer's resistance to change. I recently got a phone call from a Canadian company trying to sell me satellite television. With peer to peer filesharing legal in Canada, why would I pay for satellite? I would rather download the show and watch it commercial-free at 4 am (or whenever). But the satellite company is flourishing due to consumer's resistance to change.

13:39 / 12.12.06

nocturne, you say you disagree with me in your second point, but i'm not sure how what you said makes that case.

i was referring to the length of vinyl records and their influence on the size of albums.
as you point out, most of them were under an hour, but over forty minutes.
the common half-an-hour-each-side LP format was brought out by columbia in the late forties, and is still the longest available.(i think you can eke more out of it, but you lose sound quality)
two sides of thirty minute vinyl would be best filled by an album of that size.

with CDs the time is not split between two sides, and is almost an hour and a half.
more albums are longer as a result, and you also notice no care is paid to second side opening tracks, as was.

limitations dictate style, all across art.
i think this is just one more example.

17:44 / 12.12.06

Nocturne - I understand what you mean with regards to young people and buying music, but young people are already the main market for singles, aren't they? It definitely makes sense if you're on a limited budget to be buying single tracks and whatnot, but I think that if you have more money then buying larger collections of songs is a good idea. I'm never really that fussed if an album has 10 or 20 songs on it and length seems an odd criteria for discerning how good an album is, but I can certainly see how that would make a difference if you don't have that much music-money.

Also, if you find that only two songs on an album are any good and the rest is packed with filler and bad remixes, surely it just that the album or band isn't up to much, rather than the 'album' as a medium for buying music? What kinds of bands were these? Maybe we're just buying different sorts of music, but I hardly ever find myself with an album full of crap.

14:11 / 13.12.06

toksik - You meant vinyls as "available technology"? Ok then, I can understand that. Thanks for clarifying

John - You're right, the albums weren't any good. At the time I was trying to listen to Christian pop/rock. As no one I knew listened to the stuff, I had no way to determine if I liked it or not until after I bought the album. I often felt like I'd wasted my money (especially if the album was short).

I don't think that the album as a medium for buying music is going anywhere anytime soon. I'm just glad it's not my only option.