The record business's latest bright idea - forcing us to pay for songs we don't want
The American record industry's most recent action reveals them as the least "customer-facing" industry in the world.
The big labels have noted that when they have a big hit track in the era of on-line sales, the public, not surprisingly, buys the song they like and leaves the rest.
What's their response to this? To give you less stuff that you don't want? No. Instead their solution is to remove entire albums from the Itunes store so that if you want the track you have to pay many times more to buy the whole lot, most of which, as we have all learned to our cost, is filler. This is what they've done with the latest albums by Kid Rock and Estelle, both of whom have enjoyed big hits.
This latest move risks exposing the dirty secret of the music business. During the 90s the music business prospered by charging £14 for long-players mainly comprised of stuff we didn't like and didn't listen to. Now the technology allows customers to "unbundle" the record and take just the stuff they like. So they do.
The artists whinge that by doing this we are rending the seamless garment of their art. (Oh, yes, I've heard those records.) The record executives look at it this way: this is *costing* us.
I have a solution. Acts should record less but make what they record, er, better. Instead of putting out one twelve-track album every eighteen months, acts should put out an appropriately-priced four-track album twice a year.
Given that format all four tracks would have to be good. If your new release is just twenty minutes long, people form an impression of it more quickly. There would be no room for the lame tunes that clog up the latter part of a standard CD. If you haven't got enough new songs, then do a cover version or put on a live track that the fans want. Tell a joke. Do anything except foist that track by the keyboard player that you *know* isn't good enough on us.
Then price it in such a way that to buy the four-track album on-line is: a) cheaper than buying the four individual tracks; b) worth taking a punt on in a way that, in most cases, a 12-track album never will be.
This method will also significantly reduce the amount of sub-standard music because bands won't embark on recording the next four tracks until they've seen how they previous four were received. In this way new records will be more like bulletins and less like tablets handed down from Mount Olympus.
The problem is that both acts and record companies are in love with the old way of doing things. They want to make sure that if we want the hamburger we have to take extra gherkins as well. They don't care whether we eat them as long as we pay for them.
- More from David Hepworth.
- Login or register to post comments
these 4 track albums
they could also sell them in a hard copy archive version on some sort of durable material that lasts for ages I don't know vinyl...
On serious point Laura Cantrell did something like this with her last release which was a bunch of covers but not 12 maybe 4 or 5 only bit missing was TWOFOR angle.
Bog Off
Sorry, I mean Buy One Get One Free. Or whatever the latest marketing ploy is to make you shell out less pounds for more. Otherwise I shall wait a few months and pick them up for £5 or less ar FOPP or the New Year HMV sales.
Ot then again I might not bother. No that's what I call consumer power.
Killer v Filler
Who knows what is killer or filler? Yes there might be some tracks unanimously considered duff but there are the 'meat-poison' songs. I have had a discussion on here about REM's Automatic for the People - for me New Orleans Instrumental was filler, others disagreed and said Ignoreland was filler, I disagreed.
Also, what about growers? How can they be judged by a 30 second sample? I bought an old Shins album recently on the strength of one track I heard. For 4 or 5 plays this track was the only stand-out. By the 6th/7th, I took to others and now the whole album has grown on me.
I like the 4 track 'EP' idea - Belle & Sebastian did it to great effect - but frankly CDs are cheap (£7.99 max usually) so give me everything and let me decide.
Interesting question
I think the sequencing of albums nowadays suggests that they know precisely what is killer and what is filler. Killer tends to be in the first four tracks. Filler tends to be near the end. This is not always the case but it holds good in the overwhelming majority of cases.
and for a perfect example of this
you only have to look at the album Hot Fuss, brought out in 2004 by, um, The Killers.
I couldn't agree more
The 80 minute CD of 15 tracks is just way too long. I lose interest during the duff tracks so if there is a gem towards the end I often never realise.
Keep it to 40 minutes - the odd CD that I buy which is that long is very refreshing.
Been done before
They used to call them EPs.
I like an EP but...
I like a nice EP, but there are still people out there making consistently good albums. I love taking an album on as a whole it would be a real shame to lose the form. Kid Rock and Estelle are not in their number, it really makes no difference to me how much or how little they put out.
Kid Rock...
shouldn't be making records full stop. I would suggest to him a career in bagging rattlesnakes or perhaps selling guns from a shed off the highway.
maybe
with so much music available they should think about changing the format for a newish band to break the first / second album scenario but i hope the album as a format does not die out altogether as some of the older artists use it to create great stuff
Hmmmmm
I like the idea of the odd track or EP concept - but I have no problem whatsoever with the trad 10/12 track album - I'm currently listening to "Dark side of the moon" - utterly brilliant, and indivisible - would someone really just download "Money"? If so, more fool them. DSOTM is maybe an unreasonable example because it so brilliant. Of course no one wants albums full of filler, but I wouldn't buy one which was anyway, and I think it's a bit of a sweeping assmption that all albums are 80% pap which "we" don't want. It's absolutely true that some tracks are immediately accessible and others are growers, and frequently the growers become the keepers. Also the business model of make album and tour it depends on have a new one out. Now we know DH doesn't want to hear songs from the new album at gigs, but I do....some classics yes, but new stuff too.
Nothing new about the lack of customer-facing
This is not new, David. The American music industry has long denied the consumer what they want to sell them bloated packages of dreck. As an executive for HMV, trying to establish a foothold in the U.S. market in the early nineties, I was laughed out of many a high-level meeting when pressing for more attention to the single. The single was a staple of the U.K. business for HMV. They believed in it both as a profit centre and a cheap 'way in' for kids into the habit of buying records. Russ Solomon of Tower eventually took that same line, but it was too little, too late. Less than half of the songs that a consumer heard on the radio in the U.S. in the nineties were made available to buy as singles, and of those that were, many were cut-out as soon as they had some traction. So the only way to buy the track was to fork out $18 for the other eleven unlistenable cuts. And despite their businesses and share prices dwindling daily, they still refuse to bow to the interweb's leveling of the playing field in favour of the consumer.
You and your cronies may also be partly responsible for prolonging the life of the album. Where would publications like The Word and this blog be without them?
I love your idea of the four track. However, it is not just the label heads that can't stop thinking 'album.' Artists and managers are just as guilty. Kid Rock, whose defense of the strategy on his record has been posted on the Lefsetz letter, rails at Apple but in doing so denies his fans.
All that said, for the first time in a long time I am finding the occasional album that justifies its entirety and rewards the full listen. The Fleet Foxes record and Elbow's Seldom Seen Kid seem to me collections of songs that are 'of a piece' and capture the artist's zeitgeist. But they are rare indeed. More power to the three minute tune on the radio, or the web, or wherever.
"Albums Bands"
Hasn't it always been the case that there were "Albums Bands" and "Singles Bands"? In my early music-loving years, Floyd, Zep, Genesis, Yes, Boston, AC/DC and even 71-76 vintage Status Quo were all albums bands; Slade, Sweet, Bolan/T-Rex were singles bands.
People have mentioned Elbow, Fleet Foxes, Radiohead above - all albums bands. The Killers were also mentioned - to me a singles band. Blur shifted from singles band to albums band; Oasis are still a singles band. Maybe this distinction will become more pronounced, as it was in the 1970s.
Well
Well said indeed!!
but
if I wanted those big hits by Kid Rock and Estelle I'm sure I could find them free to download from somewhere - meaning the labels made even less money from me than if it had made them available at itunes.