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Redefining the album concept
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For some time now, CD sales have been declining, with digital downloads rising. I've read a few comments from people who think that the concept of albums will die as the mass market only wants single tracks.
Frankly, I think this is too broad a generalisation to make, particularly so early in the digital music revolution (as it seems to be called... maybe you have another name for it). And it may only be true of pop music, if it's even true at all.
What if albums stopped being made?
If we consider the possibility of albums not being produced anymore, artists no longer have to write a whole album of tracks in the way they do now. But surely this means they'll have to produce more singles, and there will be much greater pressure to produce more and more highly successful tracks at that.
You could argue that this process is only ramped up when it comes to making money, and so musicians could just do some more gigs (a good way to spread the word and get some extra cash). But without albums, musicians will have a smaller repertoire of their own material, and anyone who gets into their music via a top-selling single will not find many hidden treasures in their back catalogue.
There's no limit!
I think it's much more likely that musicians will embrace the lack of limits when it comes to the length of a CD. A CD can hold 74 or 80 minutes of audio. A long-play record held around 45 minutes of audio (I say "around" because some CD versions of vinyl albums are slightly over that). A double album doesn't usually hold more than, say, 90 minutes of audio - which isn't that much longer than the maximum length of a CD.
I can see some truly epic works not only spanning the storage equivalent of multiple discs, but even single tracks running for longer than the length of a single CD. Of course, the iTunes-friendly model won't like that, but those are the album-only tracks. Or the ones that are freely available to download on the musician's website.
Next up: a double album?
To that end, I am now considering whether to make a double album in the sense of its duration, but without having to mess around with double CD cases (a pet hate of mine - the empty ones you buy look cheap and fall apart too easily). A "digital double" could be much more manageable and we would no longer be bound by the 74/80 minute limit of a CD.
Going further
Now that portable media players have really taken off, I honestly can't see a serious successor to the CD, at least not in the audio market. It's getting off the point a bit, but maybe the HD-DVD / Blu-Ray war is already won - by the iPod video. But then we do still have the problem of media file formats - although could Flash do for the iPod what it did for videos on the web (such as on YouTube)?
Answers on a postcard... no, wait... answers in a comment.
Posted by Ben on October 17, 2007 22:53 | Permalink | Hits: 952
Tags:
album concept, digital downloads, portable media players, compact disc, double album
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