The death of the album?

A few years ago, my friend offered to download a song his teenage step-daughter liked. When he asked if she wanted the whole album, she said, “What do you mean?” That’s pretty telling. Not only are today’s young people not buying or listening to albums, many of them don’t even understand the concept. The digital age has definitely had a major impact on music. Is it killing music? That’s what the industry would have you believe. Labels and musicians aren’t making the kind of money they used to. I recently came across an article that raises the possibility that what’s actually going on is the return to a singles model: The state of internet music on Youtube, Pandora, iTunes and Facebook.

As illustrated by the chart above, people are still buying music, but appear to be abandoning the album. It looks like the album model that has dominated the music business for the past several decades was an anomaly. If that’s true, is it a bad thing?

I don’t know that it has to be a disaster for the music industry. Popular music has been singles-oriented before. When my mother was a kid, she and her friends didn’t buy albums, they bought 45s and played them over and over. Yet people were able to make a living in the business.

I think the digital age really has changed the way we think of music. And it didn’t just start with Napster and downloading. The seeds were sown when they came up with the compact disc (in a way the industry asked for it by forcing us to switch to another format to squeeze more money out of us). When the CD met the personal computer, people were bound to figure out that an album didn’t have to be a unit any more. A song is a “file” that can be separated from that album, and an album when you get down to it, has become a “folder” or directory.

I’m still not sure what I think about that. Does it mean musicians will just start doing singles? No more coherent themes, no more Dark Side of the Moon or Led Zeppelin 4, no more 2112? The idea bothers me, because I’m a collector. Anytime I find a song I like, I instinctively wonder what album it came from and if I would like it too. Maybe I just have to change my way of thinking and learn to love a good song for its own sake and forget about albums.

Could blogs like mine be on the chopping block? Stay tuned…

Wow, this article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation is not encouraging at all for those of us in the music blog business: Music journalism is the new piracy. Nor is this one: The day the music blogs died: behind Google’s musicblogocide.

Apparently a copyright enforcement organization called the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) filed Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices against some blogs using Blogger, which is owned by Google. Google proceeded to delete a bunch of those blogs without warning. Some of them were innocent, having received permission to post or link to content. Some never received a DMCA notice letting them know they were in danger. One of the most notable deletions was the I Rock Cleveland blog, which has since moved to a new server and writes about the situation here. I Rock Cleveland’s Bill Lipold thinks what happened is the IFPI uses an anti-piracy bot that scans the Internet for copyrighted content and isn’t smart enough to figure out when a song was posted with permission or a link is dead.

My aim for this blog is to help the artists and introduce listeners to new music they might not have found otherwise.  I never wanted to run one of those blogs where you put up album art and a Rapidshare link to the entire album and say “educational purposes only, wink wink.” Not all of those blogs are what I would call evil, even if their legal status might be iffy – some of what they post is very obscure, often ripped from long-out-of-print vinyl. How else are you gonna hear a lot of that stuff? But that’s not the kind of thing I want to do. I’m not interested in giving away other people’s stuff.

So far, I have only posted links to Bandcamp and Youtube. At some point I will pay for extra space and will host some mp3s. When I do, it will only be with the artist’s permission. I want artists to want to be on my blog.

Will that policy be enough to keep me out of trouble? Who knows? Companies buy other companies, start-ups get investment capital and go corporate, lobbyists buy off lawmakers and get game-changing laws passed. Indie labels get bought up by major labels. Artists’ decisions get overruled by their labels. The web is the Wild Wild West right now. There are a lot of factions fighting for domination and/or survival. Anything could happen.

All I know to do is keep on keepin’ on. I’ll do my best to stay enthusiastic and artist-friendly. Hopefully that will pay off in some way for the music I love, maybe even for myself. Stay informed (http://www.eff.org would be a good place to start) and stay tuned.

Accordionista Dave Thomas – young musician to watch

“A gentleman is a man who can play the accordion – but doesn’t.” When I was a kid I used to think that joke was funny and right on the money. I have since had to revise that opinion many times over. Conjunto, zydeco, French cafe music… So much of my favorite music features the accordion that I have to say it’s one of my favorite instruments. While poking around on Youtube, I found Dave Thomas, a young English guy who makes such beautiful music on the accordion, I had to pass it along. A lot of his videos feature covers of Yann Tiersen (the guy who made the music for the movie Amelie, of which more later, he’s a big favorite), but he also writes his own music. Here he is playing a song he wrote called “The Skeleton’s Waltz.” He wrote it for a fashion show, which in context makes the title wickedly funny. I love the way he’s gone totally indie, using Youtube to market himself. Not much going on in the videos, just Dave and his accordion, and sometimes a piano, but the music really sells itself. I hope he gets the attention he deserves, because I think he’s a real talent.