This morning, I discussed new business models in the music industry with the dulcet-voiced Terry Gross for a segment of National Public Radio's "Fresh Air" (slated to air Thursday), as well as the loss of the album as the standard unit of musical measure.
When Gross hears talk of "thousands of songs," she can't relate, thinking of her own music collection in terms of CDs. What's going to happen to the album, now that music has splintered into singles, and listeners group songs by artist rather than by album?
Musicians are human (sorry, Clapton), and they go through phases, and those phases add meaning to their work. Eric Clapton was obsessed with George Harrison's wifeduring the Layla sessions. Those songs would have soundeddifferent during other periods of his life.
It's still possible to listen to complete albums, of course, we're just less likely to do so these days. For their part, artistsare less likely to record an album during a single session, because Pro Toolstinkering knows fewer geographic and temporal bounds.
The album is becoming a less useful way to group music, and artists could move to the single. One way to save the perspective of the album format might be to group songs by theme: "songs recorded by Eric Clapton while he was obsessed withGeorge Harrison's wife," for example. With the right sort of wiki forgrouping songs, we might reclaim meaning lost by thealbum's decline and, occasionally, cluster an artist's songs more effectively than circumstance would have allowed.
What do you think? Could crowd-sourced thematic artist playlists replace the album, or are custom playlists,
personalized radio, and shuffle mode all the context we need?
(image from prismelite)
