No More Albums?

The article on the New York Times on Monday, March 26, 2007 caught my eyes with the title, "The Album, a Commodity in Disfavor."

New rap and R&B trio, Candy Hill, has just signed a recording contract with Universal/Republic Records, however, they are not releasing a CD. They are only recording two songs and no album. The reason is obvious, listeners are buying fewer and fewer CD albums but buying more single songs in digital format. The article says, "Last year, digital singles outsold plastic CD's for the first time....buyers of digital music are purchasing singles over albums by a margin of 19 to 1." This does not surprise me because I can't remember myself when I bought an album (non-classical music) last time, except the time of the huge sale due to the closing of Tower Records. The trio artists have to keep their day jobs as they wait and see whether their two songs will become hits, the article reports.

The author explains how much the music industry is suffering.
"All this comes as the industry's long sales slide has been accelerating. Sales of albums, in either disc or digital form, have dropped more than 16 percent so far this year, a slide that executives attribute to an unusually weak release schedule and shrinking retail floor space fro music. Even though sales of individual songs---sold principally through iTunes---are rising, it has not been nearly enough to compensate.

Yet the author says that music executives are hopeful for the album sales in genres such as jazz and classical music as listeners will continue to buy music in a form of album because such music tends to be already album-length. I think that I will still continue to buy classical music CDs and rely less on digital music, just because the quality is still much better than MP3. But how many people are there who listen to jazz and classical music compared to those who listen to popular genres?

It's needless to say that most people listen to pop music. And here is the sad news: "Executives maintain that they must establish more lasting connections with fans who may well lose interest if forced to wait two years or more before their favorite artist releases new music." People want to find their favorite songs fast. This is like a trend in fashion. If you don't quickly respond to what's in style now, you will miss it completely because the next season will be introducing something different.

Ron Shapiro, an artist manager and former president of Atlantic Records explains in the article, "you have to create an almost hysterical pace to find hits to sell as digital downloads and ring tones that everybody's going to want. It's scary." Yes, I think it's scary as well. People are downloading songs at an incredibly fast speed and creators of songs simply cannot keep up.

So no more albums in the near future? We're already taken away the entertainment of browsing in music stores after Tower Records going out of business. I guess we will have to spend even more time in front of our computers looking for songs to buy...

The article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/business/media/26music.html?_r=1&oref=slogin