Instant iPudding, The Death of The Album

A recent post at aworks started me thinking about itunes and its imminent effect on the death of albums. I must admit, I love itunes. The ability to have all my music a click away is truly remarkable. Plus, I too have fallen for the random play feature.

An article that aworks shot my way contained this quote.

The industry looks at the Internet as this dastardly monster, but the reality is kids just took advantage of it to get what they want: singles, not albums."

I found this extremely depressing. This new impatient generation. Have we ingrained quicker, faster, drive through and sound bite so squarely on their psyche that they literally do not have time for the art of discovery. The discovery is what an album is about and we should make time for the journey. I usually find that after repeated listens to most albums that the tracks with the most depth were the ones that unfolded over time.

My fear is that the music industry, or evil doers as i like to think of them, will begin to think why should we pay a band tons of money to sit in a studio and produce fifteen songs when we're only going to market one or two. Its going to be interesting to see how it sorts out. Will record companies only sign artists for eleven songs instead of three albums. The artist will have even fewer freedoms to push the creative process.

One other thought, Being an artist, I know how much blood sweat and tears can go into the production of an album. It is somewhat frustrating that the end result will be a compressed MP3 spit out on tiny headphones. Roll over Beethoven.