The End of the Album as We Know It

Awhile ago, Joyfulgirl and I discussed the impact of Mp3s on the record industry. We now have the first glimpse of the future, as the Wall Street Journal reports:

In recent weeks, the music industry has posted some of the weakest sales it has ever recorded.

This year has already seen the two lowest-selling No. 1 albums since Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks music sales, was launched in 1991.

Some artists and record labels have accepted that people will be ripping CDs onto their iPods. The Nytimes reports the second glimpse of the future:

"We're just acknowledging the way our fans like to listen to their music,'' said Dan Cohen, head of marketing for Palm. ''The idea of doing this isn't to say to kids, 'Hey, swap our files.' We're saying: 'Thank you for buying the record. We want to give you something.' Maybe that's saying, 'You'll burn this onto your iPod anyway; well, here -- it's high quality, it's sanctioned by the artist and we're cool with you having it on your player.' And if a few people trade it, well, we're hoping they'll like it enough that they'll go buy it.''

But the biggest thing is another Times report on the end of the Album:

Universal/Republic Records, their label, signed Candy Hill to record two songs, not a complete album.

That is right, the band is not making an album filled with one or two good songs and a whole bunch of crud, they are just making one or two good songs. The music industry is changing.

An American Song: "Turkey in the Straw"

Were you aware that the Library of Congress is filled with more then just great books ? It has lots of great music too. Here is just an example:

Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection

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ITEM TITLE

Turkey in the Straw

PERFORMER(S)

Reed, Henry; fiddle

CREATED/PUBLISHED

1966/06/18

DURATION

1 minute, 19 seconds

NOTES

"Turkey in the Straw" is by now close to universal as an American fiddle tune, being played not only in the Upper South but in every region of the country. It may have originated in the Upper South, but it is by now so well-circulated that it is not easy to reconstruct its original epicenter. In the nineteenth century it competed with a close cousin, "Old Zip Coon," that had the advantage of minstrel stage promotion, as well as a more distant cousin, "Natchez under the Hill," that was associated with the frontier riverboat scene on the Mississippi and its tributaries. "Old Zip Coon" seems not to have survived the minstrel stage, but "Natchez under the Hill" seems to have lingered well into the twentieth century, despite the competition with "Turkey in the Straw," perhaps because "Natchez under the Hill" is usually in the key of A, while sets of "Turkey in the Straw" are typically in either D or G. Henry Reed's version of "Natchez under the Hill," which he called "Natchez," appears elsewhere in this collection (AFS 13705a35, AFS 13035b07). All these American cousins, together with others such as the play-party song "Jolly Is the Miller," seem to be derived from an eighteenth-century British air often called "The Rose Tree." This lineage is discussed, and many variants are listed, in the notes to American Fiddle Tunes (Library of Congress, AFS L62).

MUSICAL FEATURES

Key: D
Meter: 4/4
Strains: 2 (low-high, 4-4)
Rendition: 1r-2r-1r-2r-1
Phrase Structure: ABAC QRSC (abcd abc'e c"c"qq' rsc'e)
Compass: 12

STYLISTIC FEATURES

Slurred bowing, high D on E-string.

ALTERNATE TITLE(S)

Natchez under the Hill
Natchez
Old Zip Coon
Jolly is the Miller
The Rose Tree

TRANSCRIPTION

Turkey in the Straw [transcription]

GENRE(S)

Breakdowns
Reels
Fiddle tunes
Instrumentals--fiddle

SPOKEN

HENRY REED: You know that, don't you?
ALAN JABBOUR: Yeah, I know.
WOMAN: "Turkey in the Straw."

COLLECTOR(S)

Jabbour, Alan
Jabbour, Karen Singer

LOCATION

Reed family home, Glen Lyn, Virginia (Giles County)

FORMAT

sound recording

CALL NUMBER

LWO 5031 reel 3B, AFS 13033B:13

DIGITAL ID

afcreed 13033b13

The MP3, destroyer of worlds

Since Yahoo has been keeping track of the most searched words and I have been paying attention to its listings, there have been two most searched for phrases. "Porn" has been number 1 for every year except in 2000 when "mp3" was number 1 and Napster was created.

The mp3 has changed the music industry like no other single act. The mp3 allows the listener to spend their money differently then ever before. No longer can a band or a record label afford to make crappy songs, as they will not sell. Artists and record labels have begun to reduce the risks they are taking with music. Less and less bands are doing unique things with their songs and more and more albums are sounding a lot like albums that the band had just released.

The mp3 allows those of us who would never think of buying an album of a particular artist or a genre of music to listen to and learn new music. Sharing your music with your friends has been taken to a new high, as both your taste and that of your friends can grow exponentially. I for one would never purchase a Justin Timberlake album, but someone at my office downloaded a few of his songs and played them at work, which made work more enjoyable. Justin's music flowed with our work really well and often times lifted our spirits as he was always happy. This experience could not have happened before the mp3.

As Joyful Girl wrote, the ability, freedom, and ease for the listener to chose the order of the songs makes listening to music a better experience, as you can order the songs to fit your moods instead of those of the creator.

The biggest impact the mp3 has had is, of course, on the bottom line of the record industry. CD sales have been dropping every year since 2000. The record industry has been successfully sued for artificially keeping the cost of CDs inflated the last few years. Currently, record labels make the bulk of their profit from the bands they sign off album sales, but album sales and profit from those sales have recently been in serious decline . This has started a shift in both marketing and record contracts. More and more labels are taking cuts of T-Shirt sales and other merchandise and larger cuts of concert revenue.

The mp3 has altered the course of the music industry.

A Revolution

The thought of being without my digital music library induces a state of panic and displacement, and I'm sure this is a common reaction among music lovers. Part of our appreciation of music now involves having songs come up randomly on playlists or mp3 players for our instant enjoyment. This is different from the days when we primarily relied on CD players or even the old-school tape days. We had some freedom in skipping tracks then, but by and large we listened to albums straight through. Tracks that were different in positive or negative ways stood out, and we had a greater sense of the ordering of songs on an album.

With the advent of mp3s and file sharing programs, it’s much easier to remember an artist or album by a few select tracks and not by the whole package. For college students, downloading or buying a few songs from, say, The Open Door by Evanescence, is more economical than buying the album itself. In one sense, this is wonderful. If people who otherwise wouldn’t acquire music have a way of doing so, this lets the band reach more people and quickly broadens people's musical horizons. In another sense, however, not taking the step of buying the album can prevent listeners from grasping vital elements of its composition. When listening to the above-mentioned album in a small group, we pored over the lyric booklet and the way it was artfully put together. We talked about how the songs seemed to move in a thematic progression that resonated with Amy Lee‘s personal experience. If all a listener knows of an album is a few tracks that soon become shuffled into a rotating library, he or she misses the sensation of viewing it as a work of art that holds itself together. Albums like Tori Amos' Scarlet’s Walk that seem to be held together by a vague storyline, or Green Day’s American Idiot, which clearly is, can lose their continuity as some songs become more important than others or some parts of the story are even deleted.

Despite this risk, the mp3 is a dynamic invention that lets listeners have control over music. Arranging songs from multiple artists and albums on playlists or mixes is an example of active listening. The mp3 is democratic, as it lets music buffs take the same action that would be taken by band members or producers toward songs in manipulating song order for different effects.

When people of generations past say that artists don’t put enough thought into the creation of albums, they don’t always take into account that the way we think of music has drastically changed and that we assert almost as much authority over the material we hear as the artists who produce it. Music downloading programs should not be feared for a tendency to draw people away from the artists' work, but acknowledged for the shift in dynamic they cause. Although appreciation of music is changing, it's not diminishing. The die-hards will still by albums, listen to them from start to finish, and extend the power of the songs on said albums through the new tool found in mp3s.

On an unrelated note, Happy Holidays to all our faithful readers!