Interesting article: "No one has time to listen to albums"

There are still bands?
 
I thought all the bands got old and members croaked.
I was thinking there are two members left from The Beatles and The Who...maybe they
could form something that would sell a million. The Whootles.

There are lots of reasons albums are a dying format and his whine whine version is probably the weakest reason.  Nostalgia is truly a beats of tunnel vision.  Songwriters, unless they happen to be performers as well, have rarely gotten that much attention compared to the front men in music.  The rare ones that did were also marketing geniuses who did a lot more than write songs.  I don't recall popular music programs of yesteryear like American Bandstand, Midnight Special or even Soul Train focusing on songwriters. They focused on hits, whether one-hit wonders or music legends. Pop Stars who don't write their own songs is not a new phenomena either.  I highly doubt time is a major factor. People listen to music as much as the year did and have more means to bring music with them than they ever did.  You couldn't take your Frank Zappa album with you back in the early 70's.  Even the walkman was not invented.  Now you can take every album you ever owned on one device if you choose. Albums don't sell as well because music marketing realized focusing on singles was a way to generate quick sales with less investment in artists. 
 
The switch to singles driven sales began in the 90's before digital based music became the norm. Labels could launch a strong single and albums were bought before people had a chance to realize the hit song was the only good song on the album.  I know of one group that the label was in such a rush to put out an album that they gambled on releasing the group's demo as the album.  It generated sales but probably ruined the group's career before it was really launched. Albums don't sell that well because most albums aren't very good in the pop world.  Gone are the days of blindly buying an album without listening to it.  Even pirates tend to download the whole album and delete most of the songs on it. There are lots of reasons for that trend as well. One big reason is the dominant producers in the pop world don't come cheap. The guy that produces most of Justin Timberlake's albums charges between 500k to a million per song because most of his songs end up being hits.  Only people of Timberlake's stature can afford producers of that type on an entire album.  Most settle for ponying up for a hit or 2 and having lesser tier producers on the rest of the songs.

The idea that the demands of employment are responsible for the decline in album sales is ridiculous. Perhaps recording artists are working three times as hard for a third of the money, but most people are not working three times as many hours as their parents. Album listening has fallen because the competing opportunities/demands on leisure time are so much more appealing to the average person that the idea of sitting in a quiet room with the stereo playing seems like a waste of time. Albums hit their heyday at a time when broadcast TV in many markets was limited to a handful of channels and video games consisted of bouncing an imaginary ball back and forth between two imaginary paddles on the TV screen. Given the option to stream high definition movies onto a 60 inch plasma screen, or play massive online games, the passive action of listening to the same tunes in the same order over and over again pales by comparison. Most people who are listening to music now are probably doing so when they cannot do much of anything more entertaining...driving etc. Or they are consuming music as the background of some other entertainment format. The album organizational format is not really useful in that context.

Wow - forum deleted my post!

 
I still enjoy the whole 'ritual' of unpacking and playing a new album - I even read the sleeve notes
 
Having said that, cracking open a CD case and putting the disc in my PC doesn't seem to hold the same 'excitement' as carefully inspecting an LP, laying it on the turntable and making sure the stylus was clean.
 
There are a couple of major differences between then and now, one beneficial, the other not so much. Generally speaking, I still buy CDs on personal preference and on recommendations from others, but the advantage now is that one can usually listen to an album's tracks online before deciding on whether or not to buy it.
 
On the down side, I think the change from LPs to CDs has to some extent (and maybe paradoxically) led to a decrease in the popularity of the album format - specifically, that a CD can hold about twice as much music as an LP. This might tie in with the limited attention span/other competing entertainment theory, in as much as it always seemed just about the 'right' length of time to listen to 20 minutes of music, then punctuate the experience by having to get up and flip the record over for the other 20 minutes. A lot of bands nowadays seem to believe they have to fill up virtually all of the 80 minutes available on a CD. This might mean we get a lot of 'filler' tracks, or maybe that bands only release a CD album half as frequently that they might have once released an LP.
 
One thing for sure is that the 80 minute CD format is cool for reissues/remasters of older albums when the record company uses the extra capacity over the original LP for example to add in tracks that were only ever released as singles.
 
I often wonder how many others there are out there like me who don't much care for buying music in mp3 format? I would certainly buy a lot more music if it was available to download at equivalent to CD/wave quality. Surely these days, with relatively cheap storage drives and rapid download speeds, there is a case to be made for offering 16/44.1 (or higher) quality downloads as an alternative to mp3? I'm guessing that the powers-that-be must have done their market research on this possibility, but I'd imagine that those of us who would buy better quality downloads if they were available must be dwarfed into insignificance against the mp3/iTunes generation.
 
 

Rain
 
Who sits quietly in front of the speakers to listen to music with no source of distraction but the album sleeve?
 

He he - I still do that to this day Krist!
 
My hi-fi amp and (ancient) Pioneer speakers are connected up to my PC - all I have to do is hit 'play' and then mosey on over to the sofa
 
Either that, or I listen through my Sennheisers - that way I don't even need to do any moseying   
 
Coincidentally, I did exactly that just yesterday evening to listen to the Blu-ray disc of The Endless River in all of its 96kHz/24bit loveliness 

I listen to hours of music every day (if I get the chance) and it's never albums. The only time in my life when I listened to albums was driving the car and listening to Rubber Soul on cassette about a million times in a row.
 
I like to pace around alot doing other things with the music going !@#$ing loud when I'm at home. Sometimes I create a setlist or other times go over to the computer and pick out the next song when the first is playing.
 
When I look at alot of albums I don't accept the idea of an album as a cohesive unit alot of the time. Sure, you've got the rock operas and concept albums but alot of the time, even on those, the songs don't go together. It's marketing hype. Even John Lennon said that Sergent Pepper was not really linked- only about 3 or 4 songs. Same with the back side of Abbey Road- totally disparate styles just wiped into each other. 
 
Somethi;ng like the Goldberg Variations I can accept as a complete piece of art.
 
I like "Singles" culture. Don't buy the songs you'll never listen to.

My sickness/addiction is that I'm too much of a "completionist" which compels me to buy everything from an artist.  Needless to say, that leads to only getting albums and not individual songs.  Alternatively, I rarely listen to an album.  Usually I cue up several albums from the same artist (mostly in chronological sequence) and let them play.  When I'm not doing that, I like to shuffle-play from an entire genre or some specific area of a subgenre.

I'm not even sure if it is a matter of the younger generation not appreciating music as much. Hard to compare.  i just think technology has changed the dynamics of how we listen to music. I know kids who have spotify and pandora going damn near 24-7. Their phones are used much more for music and surfing web than they are for actual talking.  My son listens to a ridiculous amount of music daily from various eras.  In fact, the internet has made much easier for him to find obscure albums I was never able to get a hold of as a child.  No, he's not running out to buy that rare Coltrane recording he found on youtube, but he's certainly listening.  He comes to me almost daily and will bring up some artist i had forgotten about to ask "have you ever heard this album". Although i miss the feeling of unwrapping that album and reading the credits, I don't miss figuring out how i was going to store my 15,000+ vinyl collection where it would not warp in the summer.

dubdisciple
... I don't miss figuring out how i was going to store my 15,000+ vinyl collection where it would not warp in the summer.

Ha!  Ohhhh yeah...  Plus the fact that they took an amazing amount of space and were quite heavy too.  Making sure they were sorted just right so you could actually find something was a load of fun as well!

Hehe, "Holds 24 records."  Why would you even need that for only 24 records??!  Great find Steve!  Now I would have only needed to buy about 200 of them plus moving to a house with a few empty rooms... 

Zonno
How long does it take you to drive to work?
Can you listen to an album in that period?
Yes, you can.

No I can't.
 
It takes me ~11 minutes to drive to work and that includes backing out of the driveway.

I guess one thing this thread demonstrates that the answer given by the article definitely ignores a lot of other options.  Remember when you wanted certain songs from an album you had to buy the album because there was no single?  Now you can buy a la carte and even legal freebies are common.  I woke up wit ha Katie Perry album on my phone and still not sure how it got there

No ****!
 

craigb
No ****!
 

**** yes!!!