I know where the album sales went.

[andrewducker]

You weren't listening to the albums anyway.

Well, ok, some of you were. I mean, some of those albums were good all the way through. And sometimes it was easier to just slide the shiny disc into the slot and press play, without having to tell your CD player which tracks you wanted to hear.

But once you got away from those shiny discs, and started listening to the music as files, pure data cut adrift from any physical context, it suddenly became much easier to make that brief decision, once, to never listen to the filler again.

You might start off with an album, ripped from its substrate and converted into MP3s (or AACs or FLAC, depending on your technology, or how bat-like your ears seem to you), but listen to it a few times and the ones that started to grate are trivial to delete. A couple of clicks and you never have to hear them again.

Sometimes the work of removing the fluff was forced on you - if your music player didn't have space for your whole collection then you'd have to pick and choose what you copied over. And in that case, why _would_ you bring the tracks that just didn't work for you.

Once you start taking control it feels odd not to be in control of your listening experience. Making compilations for friends, for loved ones, was always a bonding experience. Now it's easy to do the same for yourself on the fly. Click a few times and put together the perfect soundtrack for whatever you're up to next. Or just cut loose and shuffle your entire collection, algorithms surprising you with bursts of long-forgotten music, dredged from your history, moments of childhood taking you by surprise, memories brought back by connections that haven't been triggered in an age.

So would you buy whole albums from bands you didn't love? You've heard a few tracks on the radio, maybe streamed the album to work out what was gold and what was straw, and now you're making the effort to pay for the music when frankly you didn't have to. Why pay for the dross?

And _that_ is why single sales are up by 3million in the last year, while album sales are down by the same amount*. Because when you stopped buying the physical albums** you mostly didn't transfer over to buying a digital version of the same thing. You realised that you didn't need to be ripped off any more, and just bought the tracks you liked***.



* http://www.bpi.co.uk/press-area/news-amp3b-press-release/article/solid-digital-albums-growth-in-q2-2012.aspx
**Of course, the big peak of CD sales came from people converting all of their vinyl to CDs. And that's now long gone.
*** That's those of you who bought an album at all. Personally, I'm paying £120/year for unlimited music, and I'm fine with that.

Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

I almost always listen to the album start to finish, or start to "have to leave now". (This does mean that my listening profile tends to favour the first few tracks on an album).

[andrewducker]

My understanding is that this is a dying method of listening to music. Along with albums themselves :->

I do much the same myself, a fair chunk of the time, except that I tend to remove tracks from the playlist if I still dislike them after a few listens.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I think your understanding is correct. It's sort of sad as some albums definitely have an "order" to listen to them. I suppose I feel some kind of obligation to try to listen to the album as the artist intended (though I don't know if modern artists think about it so much).
Some classic albums have tracks that make no sense if played out of order (e.g. track 1 is a spoken intro to track 2 with seamless merge). There was briefly a phase where artists seemed to be deliberately creating tracks which must be listened to in order because for a few years around I guess 2004-2006 a lot of my albums when listened on mp3 had "clicks" (drop out to silence for a fraction of a second) between track transitions before mp3 playing technology (both on computer and "in pocket") got better at transition things between tracks. I don't know if it's just a perception thing or if it was deliberately to make the CD experience better than the mp3 experience (which didn't work massively well).

[andrewducker]

Yes. Listening to all sorts of music in my collection would leave annoying pauses in-between tracks that continued into each other. Very annoying.

[naath.livejournal.com]

For some reason "At the Drop of a Hat" has the intros to each song at the end of the previous track... it is very odd to listen to them out of order! (I could fix it, but I'm lazy).

There are "albums" I like to listen to straight through - things like classical recordings where each "track" is a movement within a larger piece; also some albums are interestingly thematic, and are worth listening to as a set at least once.

[steer.livejournal.com]

By Flanders and Swann? Well I guess they weren't doing it to prevent ripping to mp3 unless they were very farsighted.

[naath.livejournal.com]

The people who produced the CD may have been doing it to prevent ripping - I don't know when the edition I have was put together.

[ggreig]

Having the track begin at the start of the song was probably seen as more radio-friendly - even back in the days of vinyl. That would be my guess.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Oh, that makes sense.

[andrewducker]

I am amused that I dropped a reference to that album into the post.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

All live albums traditionally had the intros to the next song at the end of the song. This was to make it easier for single tracks to be played on the radio -- it's easier to fade out after a song than to fade in after a spoken intro, particularly if you're doing it using vinyl and only have the rills to guide you.

[cybik.livejournal.com]

That's a very black and white view of the way people do things. Just because most people do something one way doesn't mean the other way will die out. Look at photography, for example. You can still get all the stuff to do very, very old fashioned types of photography. Sure, most people acquire MP3s rather than CDs, but there's a thriving CD/vinyl shop at the end of my road because there is a market for it. What bands need to do is give people a reason to buy CDs rather than MP3s, which can be done by people making awesome cover art or interesting extras.

I'll admit I've only bought about one CD for myself in the last two years, but that's mostly because I have a music-obsessed husband. He owns CDs because he likes the physical object, even if he rarely listens to them in preference to MP3s. But the thing that makes him buy a CD is so often the cover art or the way it's packaged - like the one he got that's in a plush burger CD case...

[cybik.livejournal.com]

It may end up being a minority interest, but then so is medium format film, and you can still buy and get it developed easily..

[andrewducker]

Oh yes, things will continue in niches. At no point do I say that nobody will keep doing this. In fact, paragraph two talks about good reasons for continuing to do so...

[simont]

(This does mean that my listening profile tends to favour the first few tracks on an album)

For this reason I value MP3 players which retain state about where I'd got to. If I have to leave the vicinity of the player half way through an album, that's fine, because next time it'll pick up where I left off.

[steer.livejournal.com]

That would be useful. Do you have a non ipod recommend for this?

[simont]

I'm mostly constrained to iPods for other reasons (connector compatibility), so not really, sorry.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Poweramp for Android remembers where I left it.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

The creative zen ones I've used do this

[steer.livejournal.com]

The Zen Style unfortunately does not when playing off SD card.
But in general the creative Zen is a pretty good reputation -- I made the mistake of getting a titchy one with an SD card expansion slot and thinking that would work transparently.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I have a sansa clip and it usually remembers what I was listening to if I stop the track and let it fall asleep by itself but IIRC not if I actually press the off button.

[laplor.livejournal.com]

Sansa Fuze does remember location when it's turned off.

I wish it had the function to choose whether a track can be played individually in random order, or must be played as part of the album.

I can enjoy listening to The Wall, Dark Passion Play or Jeff Beck's War of the Worlds out of order, but I prefer when they are in order.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Thanks for recommend. My current player has got a bit flakey.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

I still listen to whole albums, on CD. But then I'm a luddite. I do have some MP3s but they are on CDs too because I've used a work laptop for the past 8 years or so until I got this new machine.

[aiela.livejournal.com]

I buy all my music digital now, unless it's a small release I'm buying directly from the artist. But I do still listen to entire cds, but I also recognize that I'm in a very small minority. My daughter (17) almost never buys an entire album worth of music at once, and I thnk that's very common amongst her friends.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

As a radio dj --emeritus, for the moment -- and album reviewer, I acquire a CD and force myself to listen to it, twice. Once, to listen and make notes. The second time when I enter the tracks in my Individual Song Database. This is a slow process which might take years from CD to iTunes rating, but does mean that I hear everything and decide for myself what's good.

I frequently find out that a song I thought was so-so was the hit off the album and my favorites are ignored. So be it. I know which cuts will be on my iPod.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

I NEVER delete 'filler' tracks. Cos often, years later, or maybe just after 20 more listenings, they can be the ones you come to like more. I still buy and listen to whole albums by preference.

[skington.livejournal.com]

Yes, this. It takes a number of listenings to properly grok an album, at least for me, and it's a rare song that you'll accurately identify, from the first listening, as significantly better than its counterparts.

When it comes to filler tracks, just uncheck them, so you have the option, possibly years later, of going back and seeing whether they really were as bad as you thought.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. I spend a lot of my time listening to shuffled music, but I don't want -- by default, at least -- to control my listening to that extent. Albums are artistic works, and sequenced in a particular order by the artist, and I want to listen to music to hear *other* people's artistic ideas, or I'd just listen to stuff I'd written myself...

[random-redhead.livejournal.com]

This! If you stop listening to a track after one listen you can miss a treasure you grow to love.
I suppose its a sign of how the music industry is changing, driven by customers, driven by the disposable, easy access, I don't get it so i'll chuck it, modern culture. Meh.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

I'm another that subscribes to the "whole CD" philosophy. Admittedly in Prog, possibly moreso than any other genre, the concept of the album is alive and well and in many cases, essential, but even for my metal stuff it's rare that I'll just put the collection on shuffle. I'd rather put an album on at a time. I very rarely buy individual tracks from an artist that I'm not particularly fond of just for the sake of one track. If I'm not sure about an artist, I'll either download or Spotify them for a couple of plays and then go buy the CD if I like it.

As someone else said, it's also all about physically having the CD, artwork and all. I like tangible :) I suspect there's a marked difference in preference between different age-groups although I don't have the time at the mo to go looking for data to back that up.

[skington.livejournal.com]

I despise per-track shuffle mode. I listen to music practically all the time, and to have the mood or style of what I'm listening to change every 3-4 minutes would just be jarring. That's why I listen to albums (albeit sometimes omitting tracks I don't particularly like): to get a consistent type of music for half an hour or so.

To freshen things up, I have iTunes set to album shuffle mode, on a playlist of the stuff I particularly want to listen to (so no audio books, for instances). That still reminds me of stuff I otherwise might not have thought to listen to, and I don't have to faff about with making playlists or relying on an algorithm getting things right.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I adore per-track shuffle mode; it's like a radio station that only plays stuff that interests me. Of course, I regularly find myself scrabbling to find out what a particular track is, or clicking on because the current track isn't what I want to listen to, but overall I get a lot of joy out of the randomicity.

I also buy albums; I hate only having bits of albums. I think I'm just old.

The "Album" concept (not the "concept album") killed Rock 'n' Roll

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

It's my opinion that selling albums instead of single tracks (as they used to do; remember the "A" and "B" sides?) was a move by record companies to make money, and that it had a deleterious effect on music overall.

I listen to a LOT of music. And there are damned few bands that have material for even five or six really awesome songs, much less a whole album's worth. Sure, there are great albums and groups that make consistently great albums, but those are by far in the minority.

It just seems a shame to me that if a group has one or two really, really smashing songs (which is a rarity in itself--most groups don't ever have even that) that the response should be "OK, where's the other eight? What else ya got?" This results in more crappy music being promoted, which results in lower album sales, which, well, you get the picture.

I used to yell "Bring Back the Singles" but mp3s have thankfully done that.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Most of my music listening (probably >95%) is done while driving. I was a very early adopter of the .mp3 format* because it was a way to get more tracks on a single CD, and the system I had back when I had my MX5 was a six-disc changer in the boot. I've always been a shuffle player even when that meant having to record my own mix-tapes.

However, I still for the most part buy whole albums in physical format. And when I don't, I buy albums in download format. I'm only likely to buy singles if there is a particular song I like but I'm pretty sure that I won't like most of the rest of the artist's songs. And this is rare because I almost never listen to music on the radio or on TV. How would I know that the obscure album track isn't the one that I really like on that album?









* my first player was an Alpine unit that could play .mp3 files recorded to CD-R or CD-RW discs back before the days of small hard disk players. This was a significant upgrade for me over creating my own mix CDs with a CD-writer.

The upgrade over that Alpine unit was the one in my S2000 that integrated well with the car's existing steering wheel controls and simply hooked up to an iPod (and it had to be an iPod rather than any competing make). My current system in my 911 improves on that by having a dual-height touchscreen to mirror the iPod screen and show cover art.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I'm a total luddite. I have never downloaded any digital music. But then, music isn't a major part of my life.

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

Most of the music I listen to is either albums in the kitchen on CD or tapes that Jules has compiled, or albums on my mp3 player. Quite a few of the CDs might be compilations, in which case we'll skip past the ones we don't like, but that does require going over to the CD player and pressing skip.

I have a lot of music on my computer, and while it's been quite some time since I've listened to much of it, I pretty much never delete stuff, unless I really don't like it (incomplete albums are just wrong).

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

Ahah! Someone else who still listens to home made compilation tapes :)

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

I think there's a difference between a 60s or 70s album (40 mins) and a late 80s onwards one (60 mins), to do with the shift from vinyl to tape and CD.

CD meant that bands were compelled to do more music and thus include tracks that might previously been discarded or used as B-sides or which were remixes etc.