The Death of the Album

Since I haven’t been listening to much music this week, I figured i’d skip “Records of the Week” and post something different for a change.

I know I might (well, definitely) be beating a dead horse here so to speak, I think it’s worth mentioning this subject, especially my own thoughts on it.  Besides, most people who are reading this are going to be my personal friends (as, sadly, Facebook is the place that draws the most views to the blog so far) and not all of them think about this (i hope anyways) and maybe they’ll take something from it.

Let me say this first, however – I love programs like iTunes and the internet.  It makes it so much easier to get and listen to music.  It’s a luxury compared to the past – you had to go to record stores and buy an album, and it cost money!  There is no doubt that people are able to listen to a lot more music than they normally would if they had lived, say, twenty years ago.  Back then, there were no iTunes or Amazon MP3 to buy music,  torrents, limewire, music blogs, and whatnot to download things.

This, however, creates a problem, especially for me.  I am a huge album guy – and of course one of the main features of iTunes is being able to buy individual songs.  You can buy the most popular songs that you hear on the radio all the time and just ignore the other songs on the album, without giving it much of a chance, and sadly, this is what most people do.  They’re missing out on a lot of good music – if you like that Taylor Swift song, imagine the other treasures that could be hidden on her album!  But mainly, I think this has caused artists to start focusing more and more on singles and less and less on albums as a whole, which in turn causes the population as a whole to think this way, too.

Look at Weezer’s new album, Raditude for instance.  You can tell each song on that album is geared towards getting radio airplay, so that any one song on that album can be chosen as a single and played on the radio effectively.  Comparing this to their past releases, like Pinkerton, where all the songs sound like one cohesive unit, which was released in 1996, you can really see how music has changed in the past couple of decades.

In my opinion, an album should be like a novel, or a film.  Each song is a chapter that is important to the overall “plot” of the entire album.  Would you read a chapter of the novel out of order, or only read a single chapter?  Or only watch one scene from a movie?  Obviously not.  Its important for each song on the album to be as good as the others, to keep people listening.

Of course there are still artists doing this now, but most aren’t as popular as the ones that try and write 10 singles instead of 10 great songs.  And in my opinion, a successful single does not make a good song.  However, to most artists and record label executives, this is the factor that is the most important.  It’s selling out in it’s highest form – creating music for money, not for the listener.

Whether or not this way of thinking will go away anytime soon is all up in the air.  I can see iTunes and other music-buying programs, with pressure by bands, allowing artists or labels the ability to choose to only have their album for sale rather than each individual song; and maybe artists will just offer entire albums for free to incite people to listen.   Either way, however, it’s something that needs to be realized by true music fans – the one who listen to the deep cuts as well as the singles, and the ones who listen to the entire albums and buy physical copies and enjoy them as a whole, not for individual songs.