We all die; although some of us are also re-born, perhaps. But what about an artistic, if commercial, concept? Do artistic constructs die? For example can we truly say that the ‘album’ is dead, in the context of popular music? Of course we can say it, but what does it mean? Is it death in terms of sales alone, or can the spirit live on? I have some 300 hundred vinyl albums in my house – have they just gone skywards? Obviously not (but I’ll check). Or is it the vinyl itself that has died? Well they still make ‘em flat and grooved, so they can’t be totally dead. Or is it the format – the loose coupling of a musical story, an artist’s selection of music that expresses a time or a feeling and fits one of several fairly well defined shapes and sizes? Maybe that’s it.

The first part of that ‘format’ definition surely won’t die – capturing the essence of an artist’s creativity at a time or place, or their particular feeling at that point in time will go on and on. We will continue to make and record music that expresses time and place. But the restriction in shape and size of output may indeed alter. There is no need today to restrict ourselves to 20 minutes of reasonable quality audio per side of LP vinyl, for example. Or even to pack 60minutes onto a CD. We can stream MP3s ad infinitum if we want. But is that an album? Or do we have to redefine ‘album’?

Seems to me that an album is a package of sorts. It must have a theme and a defined size. Photo albums continue to be like that, even in a digital world – they are defined in some way. Otherwise they are just unsorted collections. This is after all our model for musical albums. And just because we can stream data ‘forever’ doesn’t mean we should discard the album as a concept. Or the concept album for that matter. So I think it still exists, but exists in a world where it faces a challenge: do artists want to retain and work within this album format, rather like poets may want to write in sonnet form? Or do they prefer to live with and embrace digital streaming and the endless track-mashing that comes from single-track online sales?

What prompted this rave was this CNET article. The point is that online sales of single tracks takes control away from the artist and gives it to the consumer. All of the artistic pretension in the world can’t overcome the buyer’s urge to buy and listen to only the music they like. But how different is this from the recent past, where we may have bought an album but only played the singles; or simply bought the singles. We’ve always listened to what we liked. Except now we can make these choices even easier and even burn our own CDs in the shape we prefer, if we want. More to ponder in our changing world I guess.