Interestinthings Law, Startups, Music; maybe in that order

Why Albums?

An album of music is a hefty thing nowadays. It lasts longer than a subway ride, which has started to feel like an awfully long time for something to take. The album form is also weighed down with notions and expectations acquired from over 40 years as the dominant distribution format for music. Because it hit an economic sweet spot between price and quantity for consumers when one had to schlep to a store to get it, it was relieved from any other justifications for its existence. Simply put, we needed 10+ songs to make it worth the trip. Apparently, we didn't really need those songs to form a cohesive narrative, and since the advent of CDs, they haven't even really needed to sound good together in sequence. Hell, they don't even have to all be good songs; they just have to add up to sufficient aggregate goodness to make the whole bundle worth purchasing. To be clear, I'm not claiming that going to the record store was anything difficult or onerous; it was and probably remains a whole bunch of fun, a great thing to do on a Saturday. However, it was still a thing to do; it had to go on your mental to-do list if you wanted to get music as it came out rather than when you passed by a store and had time to drop in.

Now we live in a brave and bold future where the music comes to us through the tubes of lights and sparks. No longer does one even have to schlep to the wallet by the door to get one's credit card, much less to a record store out in the world. My music service of choice has my credit card info ready to charge whenever I click on the Buy button (and then click something else, thanks to Amazon). So now purchasing music need not be a trip, or an event, or really any sort of undertaking at all. If the undertaking of the trip to the store used to set a practical floor on how much music you needed to get a customer to pursue a transaction, then there's a lot of room (i.e. money) below that floor, and the album needs a new reason to exist.

Why does a band need to wait until they've got 10 new songs recorded to release any of them, and why do I have to buy them all at once? The true and correct answers are they don't and I don't. They may, and I may, certainly, but I don't see why either is required now. I don't buy the argument that the songs need to be packaged into something that can be promoted as more of a periodic event; I just don't think that's going to be a successful marketing tactic going forward. Package away, but you'd better have 10 great songs if you want me to buy them all, and if they are all actually great, I bet you would have made more money doling them out to me piecemeal over time. I think the transaction costs have gotten low enough that it might be easier to get me to spend $1 ten times than $10 once, and even if we're not all the way there yet, I think there's a lot more opportunity for engagement with your fans in the former path, which will drive more ticket/merchandise sales in the end.

Now I'm (almost) as big a fan as anyone of concept albums, rock operas, whole-album covers and other such things that might have their own reason to still be an album. If a musician wants to put together a meticulously arranged 10-song cycle, then by all means sell it as such, and I'll buy it if it seems sufficiently excellent, though I'd strongly suggest a Lala-esque first-listen-free scheme to get people over the purchasing hump. All I'm arguing against here is the packaging of music in album form because that's how we've "always" done it. Not just because people are cheap and want to buy singles, or because many albums are padded with filler, but because it's simply unnecessary and no longer provides any guarantee of return. It's just a straitjacket, and it's not helping anybody.