Music industry watch

The future of music albums

Roj posted an insightful quip about the Death of the Album. He analyzes the latest public figures about single track vs whole albums sales and comes to the conclusion that crappy albums with a couple of good tracks are in fact on the way out.

I've been pondering this for quite some time and I have to agree. In the spectrum of solid albums (Dark Side of the Moon) to single-hit-in-a-pile-of-crap (Til Tuesday comes to mind) the single hit albums are definitely going to fall by the wayside. This will create more competition on the singles scale, which makes life rougher for the lower end bands as Roj likes to call them. I doubt that established bands with solid fan bases are going stop releasing (concept) albums anytime soon.

Over at MusicBrainz we have a concept called non-album tracks. Its a mis-nomer and mis-understood. The idea is to provide a place where users can stash single tracks that were never released part of an album. Think internet only releases, jam sessions and other loose tracks. Unfortunately most people stick single remixes that were published on CD singles into the non-album tracks stash, which in incorrect. The number of true non-albums tracks we've seen has been pretty slim so far. So, the album is far from dead, but its ripe for a shake-up.

Posted by Mayhem at December 11, 2003 09:45 AM