We have an entire generation that has grown up with music being free as the water running from a tap. The concept of paying for an album, or even buying a physical one, is a foreign idea for many young people. The pendulum is swinging back the other direction, as the album becomes less pivotal and more tertiary to concert sales and merch. Money just isn’t made on the album anymore, as many artists in today’s excruciatingly competitive industry can attest. The hope is that for every listener that downloads an entire catalog from a torrent site, a fan will be created. Eventually that fan will come out to a show or buy a t-shirt or some other non-downloadable thing. This is the evolution of the industry, its happening now, and the album will be at the center.

    In the 1950’s, an album was a rare thing, if it even existed at all. Songs were cut and recorded as singles with a B-side track as a bonus. It wasn’t until bands such as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and the Beatles that an entire album came into existence as a unified entity meant to be heard in one sitting. There was even at one point something called Album Oriented Radio, where DJ’s would play an entire album, back to front, over the airwaves. (If some of you are Googling this right now, I don’t blame you.)  Bands such as Styx benefitted greatly from AOR and were wildly successful. They very rarely produced anything that was not a fully conceived album. As the 60’s and 70’s gave way to the 80’s and 90’s, we saw the album decline as a fully conceived story-telling tool and give way to the single once again. As AOR ceased to be, albums remained a collection of songs, but the thematic emphasis was pushed aside in favor of the heavy radio airplay that drove fans to the record stores and shows. 

    Today, with the viral influence of the Internet, a fully formed album is an afterthought for many artists. Sales are broken down by the song and by the album, so an artist who has the best selling song may not have the best selling album. In the end, albums are still expected as the physical part of the record industry. No one is going to by a disc with two songs on it when the record labels can barely sell anything at all. For most of the artists you’ll hear on Top 40 radio, these collections are just houses for their singles, without much substance in between. The exceptions lie in a multitude of genres where there are still talented artists putting together the best collection of songs possible. The problem is fans aren’t buying.

    A quick look at record sales over the last 10 years, when consumers discovered they could get music for free, will tell you everything you need to know. Few people are buying and the album as a monetized product is quickly going extinct. Artists must now look to the future and decide what it is their album is for. It used to be a partial moneymaker for them if they could sell a couple million. Now with most of them being downloaded for free, artists have to put a different value on them. Being in the information age, why not information? If artists released their albums for free, a quick snap into Google Analytics would provide them all the information about their fans they need to know. By embracing the technological revolution and taking ownership over it, artists could garner the most valuable commodity in this day and age. They would be able to tell at a glance how many fans they have in what places and plan tours strategically. They could pass over cities with no fans and book unexpected ones with a great volume of downloads. With this outlook, artists could choose the best places to play and rake in the most off their tours with strategic effort. Although no true artist wants to look at his or her work as a promotional tool, it may be the reality of the situation. (It’s a sentiment I’m hearing quite a bit.) This would create an entirely new measurement of success for artists. 

    We can only hope that as music moves into this brave new world, the quality of the art form will not wane. An intrinsic shift will be a hard adjustment for many, but it will leave the rigid by the wayside. It will pave the path for intrepid artists willing to be flexible and view the new industry through a different lens.