“I Think The Album Is Going To Die”
The New York Times has a story on “the death of the album.” It says the trend in the industry is towards selling singles in digital download form from stores like Apple’s iTunes, instead of focusing on selling entire albums.
‘I think the album is going to die,’ said Aram Sinnreich, managing partner at Radar Research, a media consulting firm based in Los Angeles. ‘Consumers are listening to play lists,’ or mixes of single songs from an assortment of different artists. ‘Consumers who have had iPods since they were in the single digits are going to increasingly gravitate toward artists who embrace that.’
All this comes as the industry’s long sales slide has been accelerating. Sales of albums, in either disc or digital form, have dropped more than 16 percent so far this year, a slide that executives attribute to an unusually weak release schedule and shrinking retail floor space for music. Even though sales of individual songs — sold principally through iTunes — are rising, it has not been nearly enough to compensate.
It is a little weird that this story comes on the heels of the news that the bands Modest Mouse, The Shins, and Arcade Fire all scored big with their new albums on the Billboard charts; Proof that albums can sell (if they are worth buying!).
Personally, I don’t have a problem with the album itself. I will listen to an entire album on my iPod. The problem I have is with the various options out there for buying it. I don’t really buy CD’s anymore because I don’t really use them.
If I do buy a CD, it just goes into my iTunes library and I put it onto my iPod. So why not buy the album online directly from iTunes? I do do this occasionally, but the DRM and format restrictions bother me - as well as the lower quality of the sound files, although this not as much.
I should be able to play, move, and do whatever I want with that file once I have purchased it. Because of these restrictions, I don’t buy albums from iTunes as much as I otherwise would.
Instead, I am stuck in this middle ground where I don’t really want to buy either, even though I really want to get the album.
So I don’t believe sales are slumping because of “the death of the album,” or piracy, or a lack of good music. Blah, blah, blah.
It is because the industry is in a transition period between formats - the CD and digital downloads. If they want to get sales back they have to figure this out first, before worrying about anything else.