Does anyone think that the record industry’s tactic of repackaging albums with newly-added material signals anything other than short-sighted desperation? Perhaps the idea will come into sharper focus if we peer into an executive’s imagination: “Let’s see, some consumers still reliably buy their recordings on physical media, despite all the drawbacks attendant upon that mode of production and transmission. If fewer and fewer people still buy our product, what shall we do? I know! Render physical-album releases obsolescent even faster! That’ll build the market, increase consumer goodwill, and stave off the digital media revolution!”
Nate and I have talked before about the demise of the “album” as an intelligible unit of artistic expression; doesn’t this development underline and accelerate that decline? What sense does it make for The Artist to say, “Tasty Dog Biscuits belongs together as an integrated song cycle, reflecting our lyrical expression of the superiority of liberal democracy over planned economies,” when six months later the record label rereleases Biscuits with six other tracks, a supplementary video, and two mash-ups and remixes of The Artist’s big hit [single] from the album? Where did the integrated artistic whole go?
The album as we know knew it is dead, dead, dead. People want single tracks, or if they want more than one, are unlikely to care about the artificial package of the The Album. Consider that a vinyl record generally held 40 minutes of music, while a CD holds closer to an hour’s worth, maybe a bit more. Are the combined playing-times of all the tracks on a current release closer to 40 or 60 minutes? The industry still thinks of vinyl records, right down to the amount of material. The CD has been on the market for more than 20 years. According to this, stereo recordings where first released in 1958: this gives the vinyl record a 25 year lifetime until the CD and digital recordings came along — about 1982. So here we are, almost 25 years after the re-invention of music packaging and distribution and the industry still thinks we’re either idiots or criminals.
Apparently, I’ve grumbled about this before: I was looking to see if a quote I remember from (I think Rolling Stone [I remember when it was a music magazine <sigh>]) where the Undertones rant about their contract requiring them to make albums, when all they wanted to make — all they and their friends bought — were singles. My guess is, with the advent of the iTunes store and, before that, Napster at al, single tracks have been what people have been looking for the past few years.
I can see another motive in the album strategy: if you have $20 to spend on music, do I, as a greedy record executive, want you to buy 10 $2 selections from a variety of artists, even if some of them will be on my label, or do I want you to buy the “album” with it’s higher markup and the attendant PR and marketing value of a high chart position? Think about it: does a CD single or EP cost more to make than a full-length? No, I expect it costs the same. But it will sell for less[*], at the same manufacturing/shipping/distribution cost, maybe enough less to eat seriously into the blow and/or hair-product expense account. So why even offer them?
* EPs seem to sell for around half the price of a CD, based on a cursory look at Amazon.com.