The Slow Death of Albums

Posted by Togeo Studios on July 30th, 2008 | 0 Comments »

deathofalbums_mp1 Are single releases ala iTunes, Beatport and other on-line music distributers slowly killing off album releases? Probably and the record labels have no one to blame but themselves. Singles were always released to promote current and upcoming albums, promotion through radio play and such. Then you went out and bought the album with your hard earned money just to get it home and find out you didn’t care for at least half of the songs on the album. Filler tracks or album cuts, so to speak are probably one reason why most people are happy to see that mp3 singles are available for sale.

Now another side of this is that, with albums some people really like ‘the package’. The cover art, the extra infos on the inside about the release, band photos, the whole ‘body of work’ feel to an album purchase. I grew up waiting for the next vinyl album by my favorite band with that cool cover to add to my cabinet full of records. If you think about it, thats probably why tapes never sold as well. At least with CDs you still had the cover, even if it was smaller. But did the record companies take advantage of the cheaper production costs of compact disks and pass on that price break on the CD version and increase sales potential. No they raised the price instead and we went right ahead and accepted and bought it, line, hook and sinker. So we still end up paying a lot for those one or two ‘hits’, not to mention extended plays where we payed only two-thirds as much for one-third the music. They new us well and took advantage of it for as long as they could.

Then came p2p, Napster and Kazza and torrents and The Pirate Bay and Yo ho ho…. things changed. The big labels hadn’t done their home work, they didn’t understand us so well, but hey, they had a big pool of our money and the best lawyers, so how could they lose.

Are albums dead? I don’t know, I guess you could say albums have been dead since compact disks replaced vinyl. But the music package that we refer to as an album is probably just evolving into a new form. Memory sticks, disposable or reusable mediums, usb devices with cover art and concept or track graphics, videos, even posters to be printed out, special tracks, lossless audio….hmmm?