Album sales are declining (!)

[BillF]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/24/album-sales-declining-battle-art-commerce

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Well, well.

I still buy albums (in case y' hadn't noticed).

What makes albums good?

1 You don't have to keep getting up to change the record, though you also can go and make a cup of tea while it's on - if you like putting your iPod on random shuffle, you're welcome to do so.

2 You can listen to something in some kind of order that works for you - maybe the artist's view of how the music fits together, maybe chronological order, maybe the producer's view of something, or some other thing - and ditto about the random shuffle.

3 Where would the album cover threads be without albums?

4 You can learn stuff from sleeve notes - but much music isn't worth learning about and sleeve notes have been disappearing for the last forty-something years anyway.

5 I just like 'em. Even when I mostly bought 45s, I always wanted albums.

MG

[A Lark Ascending]

2 You can listen to something in some kind of order that works for you - maybe the artist's view of how the music fits together, maybe chronological order, maybe the producer's view of something, or some other thing - and ditto about the random shuffle.

That's the biggest argument for the LP I know. The care that used to go into the programming of tracks, using start/end of sides to dramatic effect. That was lost not with mp3s but with the CD - building the architecture over 70 mins rather than 18 proved much harder.

I think the writer is correct in suggesting we don't get over-fussed, that a natural evolution in response to technology is going on.

These things go in waves. In the early 70s lengthy pieces that stretched over 4 sides (everyone from Yes to Miles) were all the thing; by the end of the decade the 3 minute per side single was deemed the ideal format. Then with 80s dance music the extended remix came in.

The idea of a lengthy piece - be it a sequence of vaguely related songs or something more integrated goes back a long way (well before Sinatra!). Can't see it losing its attraction though maybe not in the form we know it.

I've always loved the large scale, unified or connected pieces; so the album format remains my vehicle of choice. I might buy by mp3 now but I still organise by album. I enjoy the occasional 'random mix' within genre, but I soon head back to the organisation the composers/performers/producers decided.

Edited November 25, 2013 by A Lark Ascending

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

It wasn't lost with CDs - CDs enabled other kinds of programming. It became possible to develop programmes like the Chronological Classics have - put a couple or three years' worth of singles into a programme, something that was never done on LP, which provides a historical perspective on the music which isn't apparent to those who didn't grow up with the music coming out in the order it came out in. It also shows the warts in various people's art. I regret I didn't realise this when they started coming out.

MG

[A Lark Ascending]

I was thinking more of new music, Would Sgt Pepper (regardless of what you might think of it) have had the same impact initially if it had been stretched over a CD? I always found those four key points on an LP places where my attention became especially strong. It's a bit like breaking up a play into 3 Acts rather than running it straight through.

LPs always seemed to be made in 2 Acts and by the mid-60s performers started to really use that format.

Of course there are many forms of music where the shape of the music is determined elsewhere and it hardly matters what format they end up on.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I was thinking more of new music, Would Sgt Pepper (regardless of what you might think of it) have had the same impact initially if it had been stretched over a CD? I always found those four key points on an LP places where my attention became especially strong. It's a bit like breaking up a play into 3 Acts rather than running it straight through.

LPs always seemed to be made in 2 Acts and by the mid-60s performers started to really use that format.

Of course there are many forms of music where the shape of the music is determined elsewhere and it hardly matters what format they end up on.

Hm, I see. Trouble is, I don't really, because I've never heard Sgt Pepper all the way through and maybe I've only heard a few tracks anyway. If you'd talked about Otis Redding's 'Soul ballads' or 'Otis blue', or even Aretha Franklin's 'I never loved a man', well, I'm not sure you'd see those albums as integrated pieces (assuming, which isn't necessarily likely, that you've heard any of those all the way through ) in the way you evidently do the Beatles' album. So it's not clear to me that we're speaking the same language here

MG

[JSngry]

If you'd talked about Otis Redding's 'Soul ballads' or 'Otis blue', or even Aretha Franklin's 'I never loved a man', well, I'm not sure you'd see those albums as integrated pieces

Otis Redding Live In Europe, though....I'll not get that on CD unless and until I lose the LP (god forbid). Two perfectly sequenced sides, each whole unto themselves, yet both combining into one. You can listen to one side or the other, but if you listen to both you damn near have to listen to them in order, else what's the point?

[Leeway]

The internal architecture of the LP is so ingrained that some groups like to mess with our heads and not mark Side A and Side B. Most recently this occurred with an LP I was playing FORWARDS AND BACKWARDS, Frode Gjerstad, Johnny Dyani, John Stevens, on Impetus. I found myself flipping the LP over a couple of times looking for the side markings -kind of like the title of the album. Then you just say, fuck it, pick a side and go with it I assume the point of such an exercise, if not to needle the customer a bit, is to break the listener from safe mooring posts and make them experience the music without known markings and directional indicators. Free listening so to speak.

[Larry Kart]

Interesting IMO thoughts from Joseph Kerman's book "Concerto Conversations" (1999):

After talking about the supposed decline and fall of classical music -- orchestras and record labels tanking etc. -- he writes of the latter" "Let it not be forgotten ... that the important thing about music on records is that CDs are played, not that CDs are purchased -- consumption, not commodification. The Schwann Catalogue will doubtless shrink considerably, or shrink dramatically, and indeed it's likely that listening in the future will take place from a limitless online digital stockpile.

"This strikes many older persons as very chilly, to say nothing of music professionals of all ages. Music mechanically reproduced is music without aura, in Walter Benjamin's endlessly repeated formula, an egregious casualty of Adorno's 'Regression of hearing.' Well, we are living in our world, not the world of Benjamin and Adorno. By now, several generations after the dissemination of sound recording, now a hundred years old, the conditions for music have -- changed. This change is comparable, I have argued, to another paradigm shift that happened or began to happen about a thousand years earlier in the history of Western music: the introduction of musical notation, the writing down of music. Musical notation made possible, as generation followed generation, first organum, then conductus, then motet and mass, madrigal and opera, symphony and concerto.

"And certainly this was not accomplished without a 'regression of hearing.' As time went on, musicians found themselves singing from a book, singing by sight, not by ear -- singing something unknown to them and alien and transitory. This was disturbingly unlike the interiorizing of melodies that singers had communally learned by heart as choirboys, and summoned up repeatedly, yearly or daily, from a huge repertory of memorized ancient song. More troubling yet, the new music was no longer sung by the entire monastic community of Christendom. It was cultivated by a new literate elite increasingly associated with secular institutions. An incalculable loss of aura, a calculable gain in musical repertory....

"The paradigmatic figure in current music is not the unlettered clerical singer of Gregorian chant, nor the piano student sight-reading a new score, nor the affluent symphony subscriber, but the lone aficionado of historic recordings and surround sound. He or she has suffered another incalculable loss of aura, with again a calculable gain in repertory. As I think back on my former argument, I would add that today's solitary listening seems a return to or, rather, an apotheosis of the Romantic ideal of self-consciousness modeled in music... -- that absorption of music-in-itself, absolute music, that is so regretted by revisionist musicologists, regretted even more than the persistence of the classical music canon. History produces these ironic regressions.

"Music -- classical music -- will survive under conditions more exiguous than Benjamin and Adorno imagined. Concertos will be heard when they are not played and not seen, or seldom played, or never played -- but the artists who once did play them will live on because of recorded sound.... Music will survive because it is needed and there is nothing to replace it. As Frank Kermode claimed years ago for literary fictions, music answers to 'a need to speak humanly of a life's importance in relation to time, a need in the moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and an end.'"

[David Ayers]

Thanks for posting that Larry. Albeit in brief, it indicates what the parameters of such a discussion should be.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I particularly like the last paragraph.

MG

[king ubu]

Thanks indeed, Larry - very interesting points!

And yes, that last paragraph ... dare I say that like that old recordings regain some kind of aura? I mean honestly, for me, music was always 95% solitary listening ... and after all there are moments were discovering something that was preserved and has been saved over from another era is turning into a one-time, life-changing experience ... or a crazy mind-fuck turning things you thought you knew upside down. Of course that can happen in concerts, too, the intensity level of the live experience is hard to beat ... but not necessarily an advantage as far as being in the right mood (is that a romantic notion? or just a commodity?) and ready to "receive".

[JSngry]

Interesting IMO thoughts from Joseph Kerman's book "Concerto Conversations" (1999):

...This change is comparable, I have argued, to another paradigm shift that happened or began to happen about a thousand years earlier in the history of Western music: the introduction of musical notation, the writing down of music. Musical notation made possible, as generation followed generation, first organum, then conductus, then motet and mass, madrigal and opera, symphony and concerto.

"And certainly this was not accomplished without a 'regression of hearing.' As time went on, musicians found themselves singing from a book, singing by sight, not by ear -- singing something unknown to them and alien and transitory. This was disturbingly unlike the interiorizing of melodies that singers had communally learned by heart as choirboys, and summoned up repeatedly, yearly or daily, from a huge repertory of memorized ancient song. More troubling yet, the new music was no longer sung by the entire monastic community of Christendom. It was cultivated by a new literate elite increasingly associated with secular institutions. An incalculable loss of aura, a calculable gain in musical repertory....

"The paradigmatic figure in current music is not the unlettered clerical singer of Gregorian chant, nor the piano student sight-reading a new score, nor the affluent symphony subscriber, but the lone aficionado of historic recordings and surround sound. He or she has suffered another incalculable loss of aura, with again a calculable gain in repertory. As I think back on my former argument, I would add that today's solitary listening seems a return to or, rather, an apotheosis of the Romantic ideal of self-consciousness modeled in music... -- that absorption of music-in-itself, absolute music, that is so regretted by revisionist musicologists, regretted even more than the persistence of the classical music canon. History produces these ironic regressions.

Not entirely out of the realm of logic/reason to suggest that by this line of thought, the sampler/DJ/whatever is not just inevitable/necessary, but also correct in basic-impulsed motivation, if not always in result. If the new vernacular is in fact recordings, then they are the ones meeting that vernacular head-on and actually engaging it to re-form it. Never mind if they're doing it "right" or even "well", history will sort that all out sooner or later. A diet of frozen information will inevitably lead to a frozen population. These folks are keeping it liquid, fluid, moving. If it's baby steps, so be it. Everybody starts as a baby, including a paradigm.

Of course, if the new vernacular is not recordings, then never mind!

[A Lark Ascending]

Hm, I see. Trouble is, I don't really, because I've never heard Sgt Pepper all the way through and maybe I've only heard a few tracks anyway. If you'd talked about Otis Redding's 'Soul ballads' or 'Otis blue', or even Aretha Franklin's 'I never loved a man', well, I'm not sure you'd see those albums as integrated pieces (assuming, which isn't necessarily likely, that you've heard any of those all the way through ) in the way you evidently do the Beatles' album. So it's not clear to me that we're speaking the same language here

MG

Some 'albums' just collect songs. Others try and arrange them into some sort of architecture. I imagine with a lot of the former some thought goes into the order on each side needed to make maximum impact.

In the rock world of the mid-60s onwards (which I know you don't have an interest in) a lot of musicians did think very carefully about the sequence (as had things like the Sinatra albums of the 50s). My memory of my early listening was the pleasure of sinking into an album that seemed to take you on a journey - like reading a narrative novel or listening to an extended piece of classical music.

With CD although that did still happen it seemed to revert more to the collection of songs idea, perhaps because it's hard to sustain attention over 70 mins without some prescribed breaks (there have been some CDs that break the music into parts but it doesn't happen naturally).

The mp3 development loosens that link still further and perhaps takes away the desire to organise over an extended period of time. The focus goes back to the songs rather than the larger album.

I'm indoctrinated with the idea of the album so still look for music that way and organise it that way.

Edited November 27, 2013 by A Lark Ascending

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Yes, OK, I don't disagree; just can't see the example you quoted. I think I see it elsewhere.

MG