Radiohead Says No More Albums
blogs.wsj.com
blogs.wsj.com
I seriously hope that they at least always release a couple of tracks together. Whether they call that an "album" doesn't matter to me.
I fail to imagine myself to buy a new song every couple of weeks and listen to each of them separately. Am I supposed to listen to new music for just four minutes and then skip to something else?
Complex, good music (which, for me, includes that of Radiohead) deserves attention. You cannot build up attention in such a short amount of time. An album is more tan a collection of songs. Every song not only stands for itself but also serves as a frame for all other songs.
If I had a short attention span, I would listen to the radio. (Ok, I actually do have a short attention span, but well...)
I'm not the original poster, so I speak only for myself. Some of my "albums" (read: CDs) are just collections of songs, and that's fine. But some of the albums have coherency, stylistic similarities that don't just come from the artist (as other albums from the same artist will have different stylistic similarities in those songs), and other things that make these albums a bit more than just the sum of their parts. This doesn't just include the "concept albums", but even things that may sound like "just a collection of songs" at first but turn out to have a flow and coherency once you think about it.
If nothing else, there's an art to album arrangement. Like good editing, it might be easier to see if I gave an example of a very degenerate case than if I try to say what's good: If you release 6 happy songs and 6 sad songs, you don't want them to show up in that order, as that makes for a terrible break in the flow (it'll feel like two albums glued together); you want to mix them together, and even with the same 12 songs, the tone of the album can be somewhat manipulated just by the order of the songs. (Start and end on happy? Start and end on sad? etc.)
It's not just a matter of "my choice"; there's a matter of the artist's choice as well. This is a very fuzzy thing and it is perfectly possible to create a "mix album" with a bit of work that is itself a bit more than the sum of its parts, but there's still something to be said for an artist doing this deliberately.
(Besides, call me old-fashioned but I think that there's still a place for the concept album. The short form gets mined out easily, especially in the context of a single artist; giving a bigger canvas to a skilled artist can produce something genuinely different.)
I hope that people continue to produce albums and not just single, isolated tracks. (Of course, albums too could be serialized. And maybe that's all you meant, but I still wanted to point out this could be a problem in this bright new era. I'm not prone to complaining about new media but this is one place we could genuinely lose an entire art form, not just be quibbling about the smell of the book or something else that nobody under the age of 10 will ever miss in the future (my personal metric of fuddy-duddy-ness when it comes to complaining about new media).)
I guess I should note that this isn't true for all artists, but for artists like Radiohead, buying a single off one of their albums would only tell a small part of a grand story.
I guess I always knew the day would come where Radiohead stop producing albums, I had just hoped it would be a lot further away.
But I guess such albums are too complicated for todays everyday market and will stay rare. :(
So I guess Chopin's Minute Waltz is not for you.
The making of individual tracks also works well with pop music and its mentality, actually, it makes tons of sense, cutting costs by only writing and recording a few songs and spoon feeding it to the radio stations and the general public. The move away from albums is a total shame from an artistic view point. You'd never end up with masterpiece albums like "Dark Side of the Moon" with bands recording a few tracks at a time. I also connect so much of a band and their era's by albums too. Metallica and their change with the black album and everything after that. Even when I download new music today, I acquire full albums to hear everything else the band has made. I'm not looking forward to the day it's mostly individual tracks!
Pop artists generally pay big name producers for 2 to 3 tracks per album, which they plan on releasing as singles. The rest of the tracks are more or less filler so they can justify charging $15 for a long play album.
With digital distribution becoming more popular and consumers buying more singles instead of full albums, I thought pop artists would be the first to stop releasing full-length albums. I guess this is just another example of the music industry being unable or unwilling to adapt to the changing landscape.
I really do hope, though, as you mentioned, that real musicians continue to put in the creativity and hard work it takes to produce full albums. The result is just far better than a collection of singles.
which doesn't strike me as sharing the finality of the story's title.
I think it's worth realizing that the "album" concept came about because of technological changes...and the singles model is coming back, again, because of technology. I also don't think most songwriters can really deliver an album, in the grand sense of the word. I think the list of truly great whole albums is shockingly short. There are only a few people on earth that can deliver an album of the caliber of Dark Side of the Moon, Abbey Road, Rumors, London Calling, etc. Most of even the best selling bands of all time would have served their customers better by providing a few great singles at a fair price. Journey, for example. Great bunch of very successful singles over a long career...but even their best album is at least half filler, and none of their albums are better appreciated as a whole (Don't Stop Believing is not improved by being heard with the surrounding tracks on Escape).
Bands that want to make long cohesive concept pieces are more free than ever to do so; the cost of album production is lower than ever, and the distribution costs have reached approximately zero. Their customers are also more free than ever to say, "$12 for 15 songs is too steep. But I'll give you a buck each for those two really good songs." The casual listener has a chance to take part and support artists in ways they may not have in the past, while the artist and dedicated fans can still choose big productions and long-form recordings (and pay more for that experience).
These are good times for music, both artists and fans. The recording industry, on the other hand, is approaching a long-deserved reckoning.
From stuff he says, sounds like he may be a bit out of gas...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssWkw26YQF0
Anyway, singles bare no comparison to albums. A good album is 1000 times better than a good single. Imagine any single track off DSOTM versus any particular song off of it.
Other threads around me point out the cons: albums are cornerstones of artists' careers, fantastic creative canvases, and so on.
But in a future when we're streaming, not owning, our music, and where the album is already dead (unpackaged by iTunes), there is arguably a future where music is released as a steady, no-rush stream of quality tracks that then get remixed and mashed up by listeners, and placed into the totally unique and possibly more meaningful context of the user's own playlists ("albums"). Like fanfic circulating around publishing, people will put together and share suggested album-like playlists anyway, perhaps even giving them their own 'album titles'. Wisdom of the crowd principle suggests these might be even better ordered and contextualised and thus increase the popularity of the tracks within to broadened audience, driving 'airplay' and perhaps ownership
Given the relative low payoff from making an album these days I think some bands would be better served making new music bit by bit between tours rather than trying to push out an album every year. It usually gets to the point with a good band after about 2 or 3 albums that they don't have time to play everything you want to hear at a concert anyway so slower production of songs isn't an issue in that reguard.