On Tuesday, in an article on techdirt.com, Carl Longino pointed out that “the album is declining in popularity compared to singles, and new artists [are] more likely to take advantage of this by targeting the singles market.” Sounds about right, doesn’t it? With the advent of the radio way back when, singles were the biggest selling point for any artist, creating the so-called ‘one-hit wonders’. Adding the internet to the mix only increased this trend, to the point where a catchy song on Myspace can launch a career.

So why is it that artists are still putting out albums? Why bother with a ‘body’ of work when a couple of hit singles are all you really need to make it in the music biz? Somewhere out there, one of you is mentally yelling at your screen that music is art and even the non-hits can be wondrously vital to humanity. Yeah, right.

Let’s get one thing straight: the music industry is just that – an industry. There are very few artists who consider their income from music to be a perk to the job. Most of them get into it wanting to make money from the beginning. I’m not pointing fingers – that’s just the nature of the beast. But the problem that comes into play is the job of finding a producer to make your music catchy enough to get on the radio.

If you reread my last statement carefully, you’ll notice two fundamental issues: a reliance on a producer for guidance and the focus on getting on the radio. I’d like to tackle those in order.

There have been many cases where the right producer has made all the difference in the growth and maturation of a band/artist. At the same time, there have been too many producer/artist combinations that have ended in disaster. It’s hard to tell if those combos were the result of an artist relying on a big name producer to make them into The Next Big Thing, or if the producer tries to force the artist into a mold the artist just doesn’t fit into. Regardless, it is a tricky situation that comes with a record deal and could easily make or break an album in the end.

The second issue is the industry’s obsession with making at least one song on an album radio-worthy. I should mention that radio playlists are for the most part NOT determined by listener input, but that’s another post for another day. So if the airplay a song gets isn’t always determined by the public, what’s the point in catering to the radio? iTunes and the internet in general is changing this trend, but that has only morphed the idea if ‘radio airplay’ into some sort of idealized ‘listener’ that is supposed to represent the general public.

Beware that ideal, music indistry execs and artists. Never assume that your audience is a brainless 14 year old girl, because even those pesky teenagers are getting smarter. Believe it or not, most listeners can tell when there’s a conflict with a producer/exec or when an artist isn’t putting any effort into an album. It’s also pretty obvious what you think your ideal listener listens to, and most of the time the tripe that’s directed to that listener either sounds like wailing cats or something a 5 year old would scoff at.

If the music industry really wanted to change according to the times, they would be honest with their potential listeners. That means denying a contract to a person who can’t sing regardless of how nicely she fills out a Catholic school uniform. That means a renewed focus on lyrics, particularly by scrapping a song that isn’t even rational. And that also means allowing artists who are focused on creating a cohesive body of work to make an album, and to let who aren’t as focused to only make singles and/or release ‘collections.’

But why would the music industry want to listen to me? And that, my friends, is why I review albums. If industry execs/artists are stupid enough to try to pass off ‘collections’ of singles as albums, I’m going to try my utmost to call them out on it. But my quest isn’t really borne out of revenge, because those few gems I find along the way just renews my hope for the sanity of music execs.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 8:51 am and is filed under commentary. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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