David Hajdu at TNR asks "Is the album dying?"
I've been thinking of that a lot lately. I like the "album." The package. The tune selection: hit(s), a few weak numbers, and a few that aren't hits but become my favorites. Forty minutes or so of music to explore an artist. The set of tunes they wanted you to have. Old fogeyism?
Berkeley Square is recording its second CD. It will be album-length. And it will have artwork (cool advance for blog readers: Chris Muir or Day by Day has drawn an illustration for the cover, peek here). Maybe I am old but I think of releasing works in album-lengths.
On the other hand, Wal-Mart has joined the legal purveyors of digital music. The album is dead.
I love digital music -- audiophiles live to whine but a high bandwidth mp3 is plenty good for these slightly damaged ears. I figure I lost the part that "hears" compression in about 1978, when I decided I needed a second Marshall(r) stack.
But I digress. I have a 40GB RCA Lyra that holds all of my 1000+ CDs. On the plane, in the car, at a hotel room. All my tunes. That is cool.
But I still miss the album. David Hajdu nails it in The iPod Blues:
Everyone knows how the long-playing record established a new format for popular music, giving artists (and their producers) more room to explore, whether in compositions of a greater range of lengths or through the creative selection and juxtaposition of songs. Invented by a music-loving engineer named Peter Goldmark, who could no longer abide what records like the ones in my aunt's garage were doing to Beethoven, the LP found its creative identity in pop music, where its function was not passively replicative but stirringly formative. In the classical realm, the most an LP could achieve was to approximate the sound of musicians interpreting a composition; in pop the LP created the album, which became an art form. The LP facilitated a new kind of adventurism in popular music and advanced the idea of collage as a popular aural art.