6 Reasons Why The Album Format Died
Although many people think that online music destroyed the album format, there are many additional factors to consider. On Music Think Tank, Bobby Owsinski posts his opinion on why the album format died. He gives six good reasons that range from the album artwork to price. Owsinski states, “It’s easy to say that online music slayed the album, but it was only the final dagger after 6 long swords.”
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no reason it should have taken this long to move on from the unnatural bundling of 12 songs. certain albums (e.g. pink floyd) were meant to be put together, but the great majority of the rest would have been better off being 3-4 songs bundles…at least in the last couple years.
I still prefer buying whole albums. I find that I understand and appreciate an artist much better when I can listen to a full album as opposed to a track or two.
Well, as a music lover from a transitional generation (I got my first CD player aged 11 in 1989), I must say I consider the album a work of art. It’s a cool format for music. It’s got well-known songs and deeper tracks that are just as great if not better (well, and filler sometimes).
The problems I see with mp3 as an album format are the following:
1) the artwork is reduced to being totally intangible by having become a tiny bit of wallpaper to your iPod screen
2) there are no credits inviting you to dig deeper into the oeuvres of the people appearing on an album – and if you did dig, like I still do, finding out about the obscure albums involving the people in the credits would be hard because google prefers displaying the most popular search results, which are the ones I already know about anyway
3) the compressed sound of mp3 has been outdated for a few years now ever since bandwidths have gone up, and it’s only kept in circulation because marketers want to milk whatever value it still has as a brand name and cannot agree on a lossless successor of the format such as *.flac (for individual songs) or *.iso (for whole albums) could be
4) making safety copies of downloaded music files is a pain but it’s necessary if you don’t want to be buying the same stuff over and over again – and with the odd obscure albums, you’re lucky if they are still being sold
5) portable players are aimed at customers who do not need more than the 1000 songs they can store and as such, they cannot store a huge collection of albums. So the users of these players have seemingly stopped collecting albums, preferring instead to hunt down the latest app. The under 25 market is App-le’s world now.