What was the last new release album you bought at the store? If you’re like me, you haven’t purchased a new album in a long, long time. Sure, an album from the used store every now and then is fine, but the music you’re buying is probably at least five years old. New music seems to only come in one form - downloads.
Naturally the advantage of downloads is you can buy a la cart…but how does that effect the music? It seems AC/DC thinks it effects the music negatively, which is why their new album is only available at Walmart and will not be on iTunes and other download joints.
And I agree.
I’m not trying to claim I only buy full albums, I don’t. I download singles just like everyone else, but I understand what AC/DC is talking about. Listening to an album front to back makes a huge difference and makes each song 
sound different than if you listen to each one separately out of context. If an album is made and produced properly, it should be like a book. You can’t just start a book in chapter four and expect it to make sense. So why should you be able to do the same with music? Albums tell a story too even if you can pick out good songs from others.
I can cite at least two albums that sounded entirely different when listening to it straight through. One is Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” the other is Weezer’s blue album. As “important” as that Nirvana album is, it’s pretty unlistenable, but when you hear the tracks in order it makes the tracks that were never singles better. The Weezer album is solid all the way around and you can pick out just about any song and listen to it happily on its own, but when you start with track one and end with track nine, it is just like a well written book. Even the non-singles on that album serve a purpose and when you’re done you wondering why they weren’t singles.
“A lot of people were saying ‘Ah man, you’re going to the big Wal-Mart, you’re selling out,’…Wal-Mart were the only big store to stock all of our albums, every single one of them, and they’ve never deviated. And they sold AC/DC shirts and pajamas for kids, which we thought was really cool,” Brian Johnson said.
AC/DC claims it’s not selling out by making us go to Walmart to buy their album. That’s just a big pile right there. It is selling out, but if you ask me, the minute a band gets a T-shirt and merchandise is the minute they sell out. But that’s how it’s done, so I won’t charge them with wanting protecting their interests…but is limiting distribution really the best way to serve your fans? If you don’t want to offer each song as a single download, don’t. Just force people to download the full album and not singles - that’s pretty easy to do, I would imagine - it’s not a reason to not offer a download at all.
Is the idea of an album endangered? Yes, but limiting distribution to only offline methods is not a way to preserve the album…most obviously because you can skip tracks on a CD too. You don’t have to play an album from left to right. What makes an album worth listening front to back is the music and the order in which the songs are presented. If your music is good and you have a good track order, then fans will want to put in the album and just let it play. Start strong and carry your audience and they’ll hang on.
AC/DC knows things are broken, but their solution fixes an entirely different problem.
A few more albums that are solid from start to finish - Green Day “Dookie”, RHCP “Blood Sugar Sex Magik” and Beck “Odelay”. After I got and Ipod, I realized that I was no longer listening to albums, and that was all that I used to do. I’d pop in a mix CD (or tape) every once in a while, but I really enjoyed listening to good ALBUMS. I don’t listen to much new music, and if I like a new song, I am going to download it because I know I am not going to like anything else the band sings. Overall, music is in the shitter, and until some band comes along that can right good music that doesn’t sound like everyone else, it will continue to swirl in the bowl.
PS - Weezer’s “Blue Album” is a great CD.
I think AC/DC has a good point, although I’ve gotten so burned on buying entire albums that I’m an iTunes girl now. I’ll hear a song that sounds amazing and I go out and buy the whole thing, only to find out that the song I heard is the only good song on the album. No amount of story can made poorly written songs interesting to me. But truth be told, most bands nowadays aren’t like AC/DC. SO many of them are just pretty faces but completely talentless. They just get polished up by record companies to sell CDs. In my defense, I did buy a whole album less than 2 months ago. A band called The Weaker Thans. The music isn’t anything like the rock you’ve mentioned, but it tells one hell of a story and is beautifully written.
Anyhoo, that’s my 2 cents.
You’re certainly correct about how there’s no other AC/DC. I’m still going to stand by my theory that AC/DC is the *only* made to be (hugely) successful, nay, legendary without having a ballad. I guess even if they have to sell pajamas and mittens to make money, at least they haven’t changed their music a whole lot.
And music sucking now is the reason I buy albums of old music. Thankfully for Jen, I’m quite impressionable when it comes to music so she can pawn off whatever music she thinks I need to know and a lot of times I’ll like it. And working at the pop station I know all to well what suck is.
I totally forgot about “Odeley” - good call. I don’t think I have that album anymore :( And I don’t think I had that whole album ripped, sucko.
I thought I heard someone mention Weezer :)
(Although in fairness, Pinkerton is also great as a whole album and as individual songs).
I don’t know much about the AC/DC deal (other than seeing the commercials on VH1 Classic), but I think it’s definitely a reaction to the market than anything else. Bands these days have to sell a certain number of albums before they see a penny from their record company. Unless a group’s been around forever, or has a mega-hit, they make most of their money off t-shirt sales, concerts and licensing the song. The record companies make no money off Itunes (contrary to what they say), so releasing the album this way is a way to cash in, either for the group or for the label.
Then again, like you said, they could just release some good music in an attempt to gain fans and sell albums/songs, but that’s crazy talk.
Maybe that is also why AC/DC is charging $105 per ticket. The market is telling them that they aren’t going to sell albums, even if they only sell albums in stores. Somebody will buy it and put it up on the internet, and it is all over.
Do bands really release “albums” anymore?
For a long time now, I’ve felt like CD’s are nothing more than a handful of singles.
G+
That’s the problem - it is a handful of singles. A “single” should make you want to buy the full album. Albums now are all singles and thus there’s no need to buy the album anymore.
I have a few bands that I like well enough to always buy the full CD. iTunes and CDs to an extent make it easy to skip over songs that you might enjoy at a later point. They could all try making good music again so that people actually WANT to buy the whole CD but as the wise King Tom said, that is crazy talk.
There is a technological change that I would like to see in the downloaded music business model.
Pardon me while I geek out for a few minutes…
Downloading purchased music is fast becoming the standard. When downloading music first took off (in the mid-late 1990’s), the MP3 compression scheme made it possible to get decent sound quality in small file sizes over our slow internet connections. 128kbps was good enough because it was near enough to CD quality. That bit rate became the typical benchmark.
Since then, there have been new compression techniques. For instance, AAC gives better audio quality than MP3 does at the same bit rate. Doubling the bit rate on an AAC file to 256kbps yields audio that sounds excellent, while still maintaining small file sizes.
The magic behind MP3 (and AAC) compression lies in the science of how our brains process and perceive audio. In addition to traditional data compression techniques to shrink file sizes, the encoder actually analyzes the music and purposely throws away portions of the audio data that it thinks our brains won’t miss. The data thrown away is lost. MP3 and AAC are both compression schemes that are considered “lossy”.
There have been studies that show increased brain activity when listening to music that has been encoded via lossy compression compared to listening to the same track encoded using a form of lossless compression or audio directly from a CD. Our brains actually have to work harder when listening to MP3 audio than they do listening to the same track directly from a CD.
The technical change that I would like to see is a widespread switch to downloadable music in a lossless compression format. The codecs exist, and some stores (like iTunes) offer some music (I don’t know about all music) in a lossless format for a higher price.
If you don’t believe me, you can try an experiment.
Find somebody who likes to talk about music. In a blind test (they don’t know which is which), tell them that you are going to play them two versions of the same song, and ask them which version they like better. Make sure you use a decent stereo! Play the track directly from a CD. The other version of the track should come from that same CD, but be ripped into MP3.
I think that you will find that the person will perceive the uncompressed track directly from the CD to be a much better performance, and much more satisfying to listen to.
G+
I think you’re right, G. I notice a difference between CD and MP3. I also believe that music recorded for album (we’re talking 33 and 45s here) sound best in that format because that was the original intent.
I believe everything said, but in the end I think it doesn’t matter too much because the compression is only one half of the equation.
Like you said, you need a “decent stereo” - speakers make a HUGE difference. So you can compress the music into wonderful quality but if you have cheap speakers it won’t make a lick of difference.
It’s like color calibrating your monitor. You can do it to your own, but don’t expect the person next to you to have the same calibration. So even if you have “perfect” color, most others probably won’t see that perfect color.
Of course, most people won’t notice such a fine difference anyway.
But like Jen said too, going backwards in music time doesn’t matter because those albums were designed and engineered for a specific format, whether than be record, tape, or CD. Those will always only sound as good as their original format (unless they remaster them).
I can’t remember the last album/cd I bought. In my opinion the problem is that the quality of music has gone down the drain. Songs and songwriters are a dime a dozen and it feels like very little effort goes into making an album anymore. Artists come out with new albums sometimes twice a year! That never used to happen. I realize that part of that might be improvement in technology.
But that itself brings up another topic all together. ANYONE can make an album. Whether you can sing or not. Because the technology can make almost anyone sound good. So there are lots of ok singles out there and crap albums to go along with them.
Becausef these things, you only want to buy the one song you like. I don’t think AC/DC would have a problem selling their entire album even if it was available on iTunes. I imagine they spent more than a week putting it together.
Mrs. Thee is 100% correct: music sucks these days! It is a shame when the crap American Idol rolls out is what charts on Billboard. Exactly why just about everything I listen to is 15+ years old and British.