The Schalter

Written by: Alexei Haigh

Imagine the scene.

A hard, polished oak table dominates the room. The walls are adorned with gold and platinum LPs, but all is not well here. It turns out a revolution in technology is threatening the status-quo. Sales could fall sharply and the whole industry could crash and burn in a matter of months if not sooner. This revolution in technology has already been dubbed by some as ‘the death of music’. At the very least it’s definitely the death of the album.

Got a good picture in your head? Well you’ve probably got it wrong. Those of you who think we’re imagining a room in EMI’s headquarters last month or even last year should guess again.

Music, and the album, has apparently died many times over the last thirty or so years.

The first threat, apparently, came in the form of home-taping which was famously hailed as the end of the world as we knew it. People now had the ability to consume music in a fashion which suited them a little more, rather than the way they were told to by artists and their record companies. All of a sudden you could compile whatever you wanted to onto a tape, in whatever order you so pleased, all by yourself. No need to chop and change with clunky vinyl, jump around the record until you finally found the start of the song and no need to listen to anything you didn’t want to. The consumer was now suddenly the master of his own destiny.

No wonder the music industry’s high powered executives were quaking in their crocodile skin boots.

They needn’t have bothered though. Home taping didn’t kill the album or even come close. It didn’t even mug it and leave it beaten up in an alleyway. In fact, if anything, it gave it a welcome boost. Suddenly people were swapping tapes and hearing things from friends’ collections they’d have never heard before and were then going out and spending their hard earned cash on them. Anything they didn’t like they left and no-one lost out.

However, all, it seems, was not over. The 80s and the 90s saw the death of the album time and time again in the form of high-speed dubbing (making things easier to copy), the mini-disc (choice!) and, of course the CD (oh my God, they can skip tracks!) and eventually CD-burners (a mix of the previous three).

Every single one of these developments was historically seen as a threat to the album as a concept and to music and the industry as a whole. Choice and ease, it seems, are dangerous. After all, if Joe and Jane Bloggs off the street could go home and choose what to listen to in any order they liked and even produce and print off the art work themselves, why touch the package put together at no small cost by people who did it for a living? There’s absolutely no way anyone could tailor a mass product to an individual better than that individual could tailor it to themselves and, despite a hardcore of people who would always buy into artists concept and the overall package, the unwashed masses now had the tools to take the power back and reject things they didn’t want, like unwanted greens on a school dinner menu.

And yet, the album lived on. The 1990s saw some of the most acclaimed albums in the history of music released and saw fans and bands forge even closer relationships than ever. Music had, for decades, been a one way street. You paid for the album and listened to it as you were told. You went out to a field and paid your money and stood in awe as the sound washed over you and then bought the T-shirt and went home.

With each and every little revolution, the rigidity and top-down patterns which have been established in music for centuries started to break apart and, of course, eventually were blown out of the water with the biggest technological revolution of a decade. The internet. The very way you are reading this article. It was apparently responsible for the death of the album (again), the letter, books and newspapers. However, from where I’m sat, there are either a lot of corpses in my CD rack and letterbox or people have once again jumped the gun.

What does the internet offer that hasn’t come before? Choice? More of it perhaps, but the principal is the same. Comfort? Again, relatively speaking, it’s probably a similar leap from having to change your record every song to having the continuity of a single tape with a whole load of your favourite stuff on there. The ability to access music more easily and hear new things? A bit like radio you mean? Last time I checked all that did was get people outside buying more albums and with things like Amazon and Play.com in their pomp, I don’t really see that taking a dent any time soon.

“Ahh,” I hear you cry, “Do people still listen to albums though? Surely shuffle has killed them? Surely choice has forced the album to become the missing link between the past and the future?”

The answer, quite simply, is no. People are still buying and consuming albums. That the way they do this has changed is undeniable but they’re still buying them. It’s not the financial staple it once was, but it’s still a good chunk of an artist’s income and looks set to keep on going in both digital and physical formats, as shown by Radiohead’s recent success with “In Rainbows”. In countries like Japan, digital radio-stations have long broadcast entire albums, uninterrupted from start to finish, without damaging the consuming trends of the world’s second largest music market. If a technological hub like Japan has no issues with their vastly superior internet speeds and gadgets, once they all reach us, we’ll be fine.

What will change is that the choice given to the consumer will force the industry and the artists involved to be more accountable. If someone can listen before they buy and choose how they listen, they will inevitably cut out the dross. They won’t buy albums with three good songs and half an hour of filler. They won’t be fooled twice by bands and brands which try and pull the wool over their eyes. It’s in the industry’s interests to adapt in order to survive, but given the history of change which it has gone through with technology, there is no reason to think it won’t do so. There’ll be some kicking and screaming and teething in the meantime, but once those in charge understand that their audience now has the power to pick and choose and that power is here to stay, we should see the evolution of the album and the EP rather than its death. Instead of forcing out a half-baked band in a flurry of hype and marketing, they’ll have to wait until there’s some substance to back them up. Instead of pushing flash-in-the-pan sensations for a quick buck, the money will lie in a quality album which provides the best return, blow for blow, for the outlay they’ll have put into it.

As with home-taping, the CD and all the rest of it, the iPod and the internet won’t be the death of the album. They’ll make it into something even better.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Click here to read more by Alexei Haigh

This post is tagged iPod, MP3, Music