I loved to see a new edition of Maia Hirasawa’s album Though, I’m Just Me on Spotify, but it made me wonder if the dear old album format is dying – or if it’s not dying but it should be. The album is a very strong socio-economic tradition in the music industry, but it’s strongly related to products as the LP and the CD. The album was also practical in a society with simple attention mechanisms. A few music labels owning most of the industry, and relatively few but very famous artists releasing albums evenly over the year, carefully planned for maximum attention. The Internet age will probably lead to substantial changes in this distribution form.
Maia Hirasawa’s new edition is, 2008, a rule rather than an exception. Most popular music albums is released in multiple versions. The digitalization of the music industry inevitable leads to reconstructed forms of distribution. Personally I think we will end up in the “blog format”, with the artist releasing songs as they are completed. The Swedish artist Marit Bergman is probably leading the way with her subscription service:
Next to last she hints the possibility of this distribution form supersiding the album format. I like this change. In a way I like the album distribution form, but it feels kind of strained in the digital world. I would like this change even better if all artists distributed new songs immediatly into distribution forms as Spotify, and let our listening determine the artist’s “pay check”. In this scenario, Spotify would not be taxonomized by albums, but by artists and their chronological flow of songs. As a listener I should be able to subscribe to new songs by for example Marit Bergman, and for every time i listen to her music, she would get paid. I hope this is the future of Spotify and other streaming services.
It would also be nice if distribution platforms as Spotify had a paypal button on each artist page, where I could sponsor artists if I like their music. Perhaps, this would especially benifit new artists – no point of sponsoring someone I know to be a multimillionaire.
In some ways I agree with this, but in others I dont. While it may work from an economic standpoint, but as the saying goes “If it aint broke, dont fix it”. The album format is still relevant to the music industry, regardless of whether it is digital or physical. As I see it, and album is an artistic statement. An album can carry common themes and ideas through its songs, things that cant be achieved by releasing seperate songs.
[...] is some careless talk about digital downloads signalling the death of the album. So before it becomes obsolete, we’d better figure out what makes the LP a thing of [...]
@Ao7hin, Everything isn’t apple or pears. If the album format died as the self evident distribution form, the creative imagination for theme making would be endless.