“Turn Album Off:” Navigating Fractured Collections
Kyle Bylin, Associate Editor
In addition to David Allen’s well argued essay, “The End of the Album as the Organizing Principle,” I intend to examine how the iPod, the single driven environment of iTunes, and file-sharing have changed the way that music is collected and should be organized. 
Using the categorization of an album is no longer as efficient of a method to manage increasingly fractured music collections. Due to the proliferation of single songs, navigating through alphabetical listings is tiresome and takes away from the enjoyment that ought to be derived from each session. There is much potential to remove music form the drudgery of the physical world, yet instead of harnessing it, we’ve settled for making the iPod operate like a digital bookshelf. It may not be as painful of the CD cases from yesteryear, but there is still room for vast amounts of improvement.
David opted for the end of the album as the organizing principle in relation to how artists release their works. I, in addition his thoughts, believe that application based media devices will redefine and potentially kill off the album in a different way. The advent of the random shuffle and iTunes Genius are only the humble beginnings of a push towards song-sequencing. This is a feature that will fully automate play listing in real-time and intelligently position songs next to one another. Consider it, a Pandora like application, which will use different organization methods to sort music based on complex song-profiles.
“Granted, if you have the Beatles Discography
stored away, this isn’t for you.”
In striving for optimization and minimization of clicks, we are ‘one away’ from making the title of albums background information. Granted, if you have the Beatles Discography stored away, this isn’t for you. However, for the average person, eliminating that extra hoop to jump through would be a blessing. One that would go unnoticed, the younger the generation is. In the near future, the browser of the media device should learn how you navigate music and adjust itself accordingly. There is, something to be said about universals, but I’d argue we’re on the brink of gaining a customizable organization system.
The first option available should be, “Turn Album Off.” What this means for artists, is what has been in the back of music fans minds for years. You may release collections of songs that you call “albums,” but the second it’s in their possession, it’s whatever they want it to be. Consider what you release, as a starting or reference point, beyond that, it’s just ones and zeros. As more and more fans collect single songs over their album counterpart, the wall separating these disparate collections is begging to be done away with. Then again, at what point will a collection not necessarily designate ownership of the music?
“Since, arguably, the album depends heavily
on who is willing to buy and collect it,
the future of the format isn’t clear to me.”
Fans are collecting music they love to listen to, but maybe not enough to buy, through services like Grooveshark and Project Playlist. The mobilization of such sites will further obscure the process of discerning which music would’ve previously been purchased or shared. Although piracy, in one form or another will have a presence for years to come, there will a service that makes paying for music easier than downloading it. The bigger question is: Can they make it easier than owning it? Since, arguably, the album depends heavily on who is willing to buy and collect it, the future of the format isn’t clear to me.
The threat that this and cloud accessed music pose on the album is tremendous, because, “If there is an infinite amount of music available,” which is, as Seth Godin argues,“as soon as the amount of music available exceeds the amount of time you have in your life, that’s infinite.” Then, he says, “Somebody will have the leverageable spot of deciding what to listen to next.” Whomever that somebody turns out to be, they will be keenly focused on finding songs that meet your individual needs. Songs you’ll like, from anywhere in the world, regardless of release date, genre, or artist for that matter.
“For listeners the Internet has collapsed time and space.”
What happens when an up-and-coming generation’s current popular music wanes in relevance to the efficiency of the scope through which they discover music in the past? Well, context collapses, the more organized and digitalized culture becomes. In Popular Music in America, Michael Campbell reasoned that, “For listeners the Internet has collapsed time and space. Users can listen to music from around the world and from most of the century.” Therefore, it has decreased the life-cycle of a song as it permeates through the masses, but in turn, it has increased the life of the song in general to the extent of ‘forever.’
In terms of ownership, forever is a long time. Since traditional collections are expected to increase or decrease in value marginally over the span of its life, the ever permanent digital song lacks appeal. For a teenager buying the Jonas Brothers, forever may mean the time until the next weekend rolls around, but for the latter, forever with no return on investment doesn’t make sense. After a decade of fans experiencing other peoples music collections, without having to borrow them, the album, as it stands, has no place in the digital future. Collecting is now subjective; there is no longer a standard, such as a record or CD collection. It spans various mediums, where the individual collects songs, but does not necessarily own all of them.
My only problem with this vision of the future is that it dismisses the existing (relative) failure of subscription models such as Rhapsody, Napster, and Zune. Obviously, Project Playlist, et al, are free services, but subscription models are provided instant, broad access–with a portable model–for a marginal cost per song far below the cost of ownership.
The biggest argument that I’ve seen against these models is that you don’t “own” the music. Will the ownership model truly disappear, or is it just a problem of being asked to pay for music?
It’s true that the individual availability of all tracks has severely damaged the sales of the album format.
The most likely reason why iTunes did not adopted the album format must be to gain market share, embodied by the percentage of listeners who only want those tracks from an album that they like on first listen.
After making such a decision, these people voluntarily refuse the great experience that one makes is when a song grows on you. Instead of saying that the album format were doomed, I consider it worth a try for advertising to tell the kids about this effect, because if they grow to enjoy more complex song structures that aren’t possible as a single release, they will develop a fascination for music, which will last much longer than that of the current Hot 100, and therefore, they are much more likely to remain in the audience and buying something again.
As a mixtaper, I don’t agree with you on what you predict about the future of automatted song sequencing. Yes, the shuffle function’s biggest deficit is that it cannot provide a good “flow” to the tracks following each other, and is mainly only good for rediscovering forgotten gems that would otherwise only be touched on your harddrive by the defragmentation software. But automatted song sequencing, even if “programmed intelligently” would mean that it could compare song structures and moods based on an additional dataset, would only lead to a boredom of a playlist coming out of the player, a playlist that would smooth off all edges, and not touch the songs that don’t fit in, even if the owner of the player copied them onto their harddrive. That would basically be the same as those boring playlists that rule the airwaves in the current days of format radio and which have driven so many music listeners into the welcoming arms of Napster in the late 90s. Among these people, there are those who do enjoy albums with their unique dramaturgy, and they will continue to buy albums. Again, this quality of the album needs to be emphasized in marketing.
For those people who for whatever reason, do not want to generate their own playlists, personalities with mixing skills could offer playlists for download. Instead of automation, there could be a future for music journalism here, creating kind of like the compilation album of the future, retaining the dramaturgy that would be lost in automatted playlists, and adding a touch of celeb culture, too, that I think these audiences would enjoy.
I’m not sure if I understand correctly what you mean by the “life-cycle of a song”. Most certainly, it seems to be different from what I would call that, which is that a song is alive as long as I remember that I like it. It can be resurrected if somebody or shuffle mode plays it to me again, but if I don’t like it or don’t try to like it or try and don’t make it around to liking it, the song is over.
Your “life-cycle” of a song sounds more like the point of view of a marketeer of physical releases: entry of the chart as a single shortly after birth, becoming an album track in its teens, being on a best-of compilation as an adult and being played on the oldie circuit when it’s in retirement, and maybe becoming a classic when it’s being proclaimed holy by the Pope of Pop. Or do you mean something completely different by the term “life-cycle of a song”?
Steve, very well put.
As the number one problem with visions of the future is that not only do they tend to be clear representations of their author, but they also view the future as if it looks like the present. On that note, perhaps, subscription models as they stand now, don’t work because they are limited to the music that they users know and don’t facilitate the proper filtering that would embrace traveling deeper into the tail. If, I’m allowed to download all the music that I know and am limited to the music I encounter, then yes, as soon as it feels like renting, that’s exactly what is.
Therefore, I guess, I’m pushing the idea that although, the discovery algorithm is both broken and may not even exist, the potential for a subscription based model arises when it offers things that no one else does. This may be a stretch, but could it be possible that the generation to embrace subscriptions simply isn’t of age yet to embrace them? To quote Professor Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture, “The public will not rethink their relationship to media content overnight, and the media industries will not relinquish their stranglehold over culture without a fight.”
Yannick, let me put it this way.
Mininova has had 8 billion torrents downloaded. Grooveshark lets people stream entire albums for free. Today’s youth, don’t need advertising messages targeting them with the message of how music grows on you overtime. They aren’t living in the vacuum tube of the Hot 100 and growing up isolated from the richness of a full length album. Chances are, they’ve file-shared a whole album, long before they had the allowance money to buy one.
As for song-sequencing, obviously, it would start from the first song you choose, take songs that go together, and readjust when you skipped a song. It wouldn’t be the same boring playlist and since an iPod already knows what songs you play the most often, it could attempt to be the middle ground. All I’m saying is that it would be a neat feature to have. After all, I’d assume there would be settings to adjust the familiarity and randomness of the selections played. In addition to that, I was merely expressing my curiosity towards innovative organization systems.
If there was a way, to reward the best play-listers in some way, perhaps, you pose an interesting notion, but I’m not sure, as you depict it, that it would stand.
“Therefore, it has decreased the life-cycle of a song as it permeates through the masses, but in turn, it has increased the life of the song in general to the extent of forever.”
Okay, so, sometimes, things released in the US, aren’t released at the same time overseas. They could read about, what we already experienced and wait. Now, once someone has it, pending on legal issues, potentially everyone has it. Therefore, I’d argue the quickness of the Internet and the influence of social media speed up the process of more traditional forms of word of mouth and mass distribution. So, yes, from the marketing perspective and in the second part, culture used to have a degree of regulation that promoted the idea of scarcity, for example the Disney Vault. Now, if you take it away from the market, the market still has the copies and can distribute them to each other.