Industry Analysts and the Obvious Child by George Ziemann -- Jan 24, 2006 We've come to the time of the year when those brilliant highly-paid industry analysts will step forward to tell you what happened last year and what the trends of the future are. Be most critical of the anonymous analysts, like the ones Reuters' Adam Pasick found for a story on EMI's new-found praise for digital, wherein we find the following: "Industry analysts expect sales of albums -- a format whose popularity is commonly credited to the success of the Beatles 40-odd years ago -- to fade now that consumers can buy individual songs online and thus avoid the scenario of a few good songs padded by mediocre filler." This scenario we're now trying to avoid has nothing to do with the consumers' choice. Here's a paragraph from an excellent article by Gerald Marzorati, the articles editor from Time magazine in 1998, which is when he wrote this piece, bemoaning the death of the album. "In the age of modern rock, the big record companies -- already under pressure to keep quarterly profit margins as high as possible for the entertainment conglomerates that own them -- are spending increasing amounts of time and money chasing, signing and feverishly promoting one-hit wonders. One recent survey often mentioned by record people found that 40 percent of record-store shoppers in 1996, as compared with 28 just three years before, will buy a CD after hearing only one song they liked. If these are the listeners you want to sell to, and the record industry has by and large decided they are, you don't put your resources into developing and promoting the kinds of artists who might make Big Albums. You churn out singles (available on padded-out album-length CD's for $16.99) and hope a few of them become hits." 1998 was also the first year of the calculated death of the single. They simply stopped making them. Five years later, the single had virtually disappeared in the U.S. Why? Tom Petty explained it to us in "The Performing Songwriter" in 1999 after he became the first major artist to post an mp3 for free downloading. "This 'Free Girl Now' thing happened because it had been explained to me that singles don't sell. So if that is the case, I thought why don't we just put it on MP3? It will be a great promotion for the album, and everybody can hear the song if they like. And they had such an overwhelming response to it - hundreds of thousands of people in a day just downloading like crazy - and then I was politely advised [by the record company] that it would probably be a good idea not to do that. I must say, because we didn't ask permission, we just did it - they were really polite about it, they weren't jerks at all. They kind of said, 'That's funny, Tom. But we really think you should take it off. It's time to give it a rest.' So I did, because I had to." With free promotion nipped in the bud, Tom's label returned to paying radio stations to play his songs. Payola got nipped in the bud last year (for about the fifth time), so now the singles, which "don't sell," are now the savior of the industry. Marzorati best captures the essence of what made albums a successful commodity in the first place, while talking about The Beatles' Revolver... "I bought "Revolver" shortly after starting the eighth grade. I stared at the cover art a lot, and thought how the titles for the group's songs had gotten pretty weird. ("Taxman"?) The first time I listened all the way through to the final song, "Tomorrow Never Knows," with its tape loops and backward-recorded guitar solo and lyrics drawn from "The Tibetan Book of the Dead," I was sure something was wrong with my hi-fi. Then I played the album again and again, getting to know the songs -- know them in terms of one another, as you'd learn lines in a poem, or elements in a landscape. And I thought about stuff I'd never thought about before." When is the last time a recording made you think about stuff you'd never thought about before? There used to be a lot of them. In addition to the Fab Four, there were also Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Moody Blues, Yes, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Kansas, and a lot of other acts that viewed their albums as one coherent thought -- commonly called the "concept" album. The music itself begged to be listened to as a complete unit with a beginning, middle and end, not just a bunch of songs thrown on a record in a haphazard manner. You didn't listen to half of Dark Side of the Moon; you listened to the whole thing. It's cheaper and more economically efficient to put out an album wherein more time and energy is devoted to the one expected "hit" on the record than the other 10 cuts combined. But after a decade or two of this, the audience finally wised up. Now the industry finds itself pinning its hopes on the single. From an artistic point of view, we're back to the early 60s, waiting for someone to have a coherent thought that lasts more than 3 minutes.