Can The Album Survive Digital Music?
Ian Zack, 02.22.02, 12:00 PM ET
NEW YORK - Middle-aged music fans remember picking up the Beatles'
Sgt. Pepper's album in 1967, pouring over its cryptic cover, pulling out
the giveaway cutouts inside and being blown away by one of the most
famous artistic creations in popular music history.
But don't tell that to Matt Goyer.
"As a music fan, I'd much prefer to download a new song every month or
two months, rather than waiting two years for an album," says Goyer, a
22-year-old who has downloaded 3,000 songs from the Internet to his
computer. "I pretty much don't buy CDs anymore."
The digital music revolution is barely beyond the Fort Sumter stage, but
it's worth asking: Will there be albums, as they're known today, in the
future?
Some say yes.
"There's a lot of evidence that shoppers and consumers like to go to a
record store, to see and touch and feel the product," says Alan Malasky,
a lawyer for the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, which
represents music retailers. "I don't think that anyone is realistically saying
that CDs or albums are going to disappear in the foreseeable future."
Don't be so sure, though. Listen to Dave Goldberg, vice president and
general manager of music for Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people): "I
think we all pretty much agree that we are going to move away from the
physical delivery of music," he says. "It won't be delivered on a piece of
plastic."
To those too young to know the difference between Mick Jagger and Mick
Fleetwood, it may seem like albums have been around forever. But for
more than half of the last century, single songs and not full-length albums
ruled the music world. Fans bought their blues, country and popular
music on 78 RPM records, later on 45 RPM records, one or two songs at
a time. Columbia ushered in the LP long-playing record format in the late
1940s, but it did not immediately become dominant. Elvis Presley built
his reputation in the 1950s on hit singles, not albums.
Credit Frank Sinatra for elevating the album to the status of an artistic
statement in the mid-1950s. Later, in the '60s, bands like the Beatles and
the Rolling Stones and singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan did the same in
rock music. Single 45s eventually became mere marketing tools for
albums and nothing more. Compact discs, introduced in 1982, dealt the
first blow to the aesthetics of the album, relegating the cover art, lyrics
and liner notes to the size of a jewel case.
Then came Napster, the free music download service, which took off in
the late 1990s and had 30 million users trading digital music downloaded
from the Internet before record companies forced its shutdown last year.
Many users have since migrated to Morpheus and other free sites, while
several pay-subscription download services have sprung up, including
MusicNet, Pressplay and EMusic.
Some musicians have begun challenging the pay services as they did
Napster, arguing that they never gave permission for their songs to be
sold digitally, one at a time. Some look into the digital future and don't
like what they see, economically or artistically.
Howard King, a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer whose clients include
Metallica and Dr. Dre, says a lot of musicians are concerned that albums
could be a thing of the past if record companies decide they can make
more money offering songs piecemeal.
"It somehow cheapens it that one item gets put out and 14 tracks get
missed," King says. "It's like someone taking a corner of a Chagall
painting and saying that's the whole painting."
Andy Schuon, chief of Pressplay, the new music download service
backed by Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people), EMI Group and Vivendi's
(nyse: V - news - people) Universal Music Group, says there's always
been two kinds of artists, those who make albums as artistic statements,
the Bruce Springsteens and U2s of the world, and those who produce a
collection of songs because it has been the conventional way of
marketing music.
Schuon insists that albums will remain viable, although his choice of
words is interesting: "The album is for the moment here to stay."
There was some good news for albums in 2001. U2 released one of its
most successful albums ever, All That You Can't Leave Behind, which
already has gone triple-platinum (3 million in sales). LP fans swarmed
Restoration Hardware (nasdaq: RSTO - news - people) stores last
Christmas to get a boxy retro turntable, proving there is still a market for
albums, even on vinyl.
But overall the news was dismal for the record industry. Compact disc
sales fell 3% last year, and are down 8% so far this year, according to
SoundScan. The drop is attributed in part to digital downloading and CD
burning. There were an estimated 150,000 subscribers to paid
music-download services at the end of 2001, according to IDC, with the
number expected to rise to 10 million by 2005. Untold others are still
downloading for free, waiting to see how the legal issues over online
music sharing play out.
"Until the record companies find a new business model, where they are
again making money on singles, they are still going to push albums,"
says Owen Sloane, an entertainment lawyer with 30 years in the
business. "This digital music and the emphasis on singles in a way
brings us back full circle."
Under the current system, record companies must kiss a lot of frogs to
find a few princes among up-and-coming artists. Companies can spend
$1 million to $2 million promoting a new album by a mainstream artist,
but only a few of them ever pay off. In 2001, some 30,000 records were
released in the U.S. Only 146 of those went gold, meaning they sold
500,000 copies, according to the Recording Industry Association of
America.
Yahoo!'s Goldberg thinks albums as they're conceived today probably
won't exist once digital music becomes mainstream, although he
hesitates to say how long that will take.
In his view, some artists in the future, especially those who don't make
their living playing sold-out stadiums, will want to release one or two
songs at a time anyway. The ones who do a lot of shows, like a Dave
Matthews Band, will probably continue to release a group of songs so
they have something to promote around the world. Will these batches of
songs look like albums?
"There will be some kind of visual imagery that goes with it," Goldberg
predicts. "Will it still be artwork or animation or streaming video? I don't
know. It may be sort of like the way they do special editions now, and the
artwork and the lyrics could be purchased by the die-hard fans."
But first there has to be a model of disseminating the music acceptable
to record companies, fans and the artists themselves. With the rise of
Napster, artists saw the promise of democratizing the distribution of
music. Now that the big labels have started to assert themselves, no one
knows how artists of the future will be heard.
Jules, a 26-year-old singer from Florida, has gotten some radio and club
play from her remake of the Pat Benatar hit "We Belong." She longs to
make albums, but if the tide turns again to singles--this time of the digital
variety--she would not complain.
"If that's the approach," she says, "I would just love to get out there and
be heard."
AI
