There’s a new radio station that’s trying a new format: all of the hits, edited to two minutes in length. They can play 25 songs an hour and still have time for commercials & such. More music ever hour! Well, no, it’s really just more songs every hour.
Because we don’t have time to listen to the whole song.
You won’t have any trouble streaming the Catching Fire soundtrack today … even though you can’t buy the “album” until the “official release” on 11/19/13.
Just like we don’t have time to listen to the whole album … in fact, the album is dying. As the article from Variety attests (link below), it’s not that the album is dead already. Not really. But it has surely been mortally wounded by the iPod and the return of the single as the only thing most consumers will buy. The idea that we want to listen to a band’s 45 minute work of art is now seen as … quaint. Old fashioned.
Most people don’t bother to buy albums: they buy individual tracks from iTunes. They listen to music from radio, or from a streaming service like Spotify or Pandora. The idea that pop music artists have to create a multi-track body of work, and then release it in a group of ten or twelve tracks doesn’t embrace the realities of today’s marketplace. As Brad Hill points out in Friday’s RAIN (link below), the concept of an album has gotten a lot fuzzier with the introduction of digital releases that are not driven by a single piece of vinyl or plastic.
This is the album cover for The Who’s Tommy, released in 1969. The movie soundtrack – with performances by Eric Clapton, Elton John, Tina Turner, Jack Nicholson and Ann-Margaret, followed in 1975.
Rock & Roll developed with bands that “made it” getting to do a concept album, like The Who’s Tommy that spawned a movie. There is no equivalent to that kind of artistic commitment in today’s marketplace … record labels won’t fund it. Bands won’t fund it.
Will consumers buy it? We won’t know until someone decides they need to follow their muse and fulfill their artistic vision – a vision that cannot be fully realized in one 2-and-a-half minute song.
There’s nothing wrong with just playing the hits. It will be interesting, though, to see if long-form music will make a retail come back and again become a part of consumers’ listening habits.
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