StoneCold wrote:Lefsetz wrote:
People can't digest a whole album, but they'll check out a track.
Stupidest thing I've ever heard.
iTunes may have brought the single back but any artist worth their salt puts out a quality album.
People still want to digest a whole album not the next one hit wonder.
Maybe what he meant was that today's culture of impatience and apathy keeps people from listening to anything for more than five mins. And even if today's kids did listen to 10 different tracks it probably wouldn't be in one sitting or contiguous tracking. So, without listening from front to back, the true digestion is gone.
And maybe the LP album is somewhat dead. Maybe the evolution of the record biz will be that contracts/deals are for x-amount of tracks only. Used to be getting a record deal from a label was for an album, ie, 10+ songs. How many of us still skip over certain songs on just about every album? So, why not save money by signing a band for only a few tracks, instead of 10+ by default? Another option might be to make deals based on minutes...a 10 minute deal might have 2-3 songs, a 15 min deal might have 5, etc.
Think about manufacturing too. When a company doesn't want to raise the price of an item, they usually decrease it's size...like a box of cereal or dry pasta. Using that analogy, the record companies of the future may still get away with charging $10 for an album, but the album may only be 4-6 songs.
I think today's kids, and the future's, will only want one or two songs every month or so, rather than 10+ all at once, every couple of years. And it may be more economical for the record biz too.
And if you go back 50 yrs or so, when singles were king, some musicians didn't even make whole albums. So, perhaps it's all evolutionary, only the media/delivery has changed.
later~