The music business no longer has a near-monopoly on the ability to release songs or collections thereof to the public. Pretty much anyone with a computer and an internet connection can create music and make it available to the public. In such a case, there seems to be little justification for compiling a collection of a dozen or so songs before releasing them. In fact, it is easier and more reflective of the artist's state at any given time to just release them "as you go."
As for the financial aspect, it takes just about as much money to create a CD with a few songs on it, reproduce it in large numbers, and advertise and distribute it as it does to do so with an album-length CD. And you can charge more for the CD with more songs (since you are including more product per package), which helps to offset the expenses involved. This is probably why albums are favored by record companies. This business model no longer holds as much water. The growing use of downloads over CDs means that the financial justification for album-length releases has largely been nullified.
Just as newspaper and magazine articles are too long to keep the attention of today's Twittering mentality, albums are too long for many of those same people. The idea of a concept album that requires someone to apply attention over the span of many minutes flies in the face of the contemporary one-unpuncuated-uncapitalized-nongrammatical-phrase-at-a-time state of mind and general communication.
So, yeah, I suspect that the album will be going away more and more for a while. But life tends to be like a pendulum, so things may change and we may see the return of the album someday. This sort of change has happened before.
As I will discuss more in a future post, I have been working to put together a side band project based on rockabilly and surf music. Those who know me already realize that this means a great deal of research on my part. I have been, of course, researching songs and artists, as is necessary, but I have also been researching the history behind the music, and this history includes a change like we are seeing now, but in reverse.
When rockabilly was at its peak (ca. 1954-1958), 45's were the medium of choice. A 45, for those of you who never have seen them, is a small record contains two songs, one on each side (SEE NOTE). The decline of rockabilly as a widely popular musical genre in America roughly coincides with the decline of 45s and the rise of albums in the 1960s.
Rather than stopping in a studio every couple of weeks or so to record something that was hot "now," bands worked longer to assemble a more comprehensive approach to releases. Instead of several 45s over the course of months, bands started releasing albums -- more songs, but less frequent releases. This stayed as the standard form of popular musical release for about 40 years. We are now seeing the pendulum swing back.
So while the fate of the album seems largely sealed, fans of that approach can take solace in the fact that these things can, and have, come around -- the pendulum does tend to swing back.
XXX
NOTE: For those of you who don't know, 45s were named for the speed at which they had to be rotated on a turntable for them to be in the right time-frame. Less than 45rpm meant a drop in pitch as the music was played below its recorded speed. Above 45 rpm, the recording would go up in pitch (think of The Chipmunks). Album's were intended to be played at 33 1/3 rpm. And there were even 78s. A form of amusement used to be to play a record at a rate different than that for which it was intended. It sounded funny. Heck, fear-mongering religious fundamentalists used to spin records backward to try to prove there were hidden satanic messages in the recordings. Seriously.
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