Harmonices Mundi

The always interesting Eric Felten had an essay in Friday's Wall Street Journal that has had me thinking all weekend.  (The essay is here, but I am not sure if non-subscribers can read it.)  [And, I am serious that Felten is always interesting--I cannot remember the last time I thought an essay or book review he wrote wasn't good--indeed, I can't remember ever thinking that about something he wrote.  Curiously, he is also a musician, but I have never bought any of his music.  If someone is a great writer, will I also enjoy his music?]

But, to return to the point, the essay argues that the single will save the music industry.  With the rise of digital music, the single has made a comeback.  Now people can buy a single song as easily as a whole album.  So the days of having to pay $15 for a CD because you like one or two songs on it are over.  This will be the end of the bloated album--you know those albums with 2 songs and endless filler which really should never have been recorded.  Felten notes that once upon a time, singles ruled the music industry--all the old crooners made singles--Frank (Don't ask Frank Who?  There is only one Frank), for example, used to put out a new single every few months, in addition to the concept albums he pioneered.  Even in the early days of Rock, the single was king--the best Rolling Stones album to buy is the boxed collection of their singles from the 60s and early 70s--much better than any album they put out during those years.  But, sometime in the 70s or 80s the LP became king, and by the CD age, the album was everything.

But now the single is back.

And, it occurred to me after reading Felten's article, that it isn't just the ability to buy a single that is changing things.  The ability to listen to singles has improved dramatically.  In the old days of record players, I still liked albums better--you could put on a stack of 5 albums and not have to flip the records for an hour and a half.  But, if you put on 5 singles, you had to change the music every 15 minutes.  Now suddenly, on an iPod, you can throw the singles into a playlist of whatever length you want and play them either in some desired order or randomly.  You can, in effect, create whatever album you want at any time.  And the album you just created isn't fixed once for all.  Modify it at will.  Now the young'ins have no appreciation at all of how revolutionary this ability is--indeed, right now any young'in reading this (a small set to be sure) is thinking, "This is what happens when old people start talking about the modern age--welcome to the 21st century...".  But, I, still stuck in my Album-oriented days, never really thought about how stunning this change actually is--even though I have taken advantage of it, I never really thought about it.  And the aforementioned young'in has never really realized how much of the way music is packaged is driven by the way music used to be--why, dear youngster, do you put whole albums on your iPod when you know a bunch of the songs on the album aren't as good as the ones you like?  And why do you have to wait for an "album" to be released, anyway--why doesn't Ke$ha release a new single every three months?  And what does it mean to say she has released four hit singles from the album--if the album is already available in digital format, how do you release a single from it?

This will, over time, cause a huge change in the music industry, which we are only beginning to see.  It won't be much longer before the idea of an album is dead.  Some bands will produce individual songs and sell them.  Then other bands will make concept albums.  But there won't be anything in between.  Either an album is a collection of related songs or you are really just buying a preset group of singles--and there is no reason to buy a preset group of singles unless a) all the songs are good and b) the cost of buying the bundle is less than the cost of buying each song individually (which means, incidentally, that the cost of albums will come crashing down--you can probably price a non-concept album for the cost of roughly 3 songs--price it much more than that, people are just going to buy the three songs they really like).  In other words, sooner or later, the Amazon $5 album will be the norm.

That is unless the music subscription service gets here first.  Right now, in the USA, the music industry is blocking the equivalent of a Netflix-like service which allows you to listen to any song at any time over your wireless connection.  That too may change someday.  And if it does, then we will all just be listening to the music stored in the Cloud. (Which oddly sounds like something Kepler wrote about.)

[Incidentally, I am writing this while listening to Pandora Radio (the Robert Plant station--highly recommended (I love the pretense that you are creating your own radio station at Pandora (someone at Pandora was clever--who doesn't dream of creating a radio station?))) which is as close as you can come to the World-To-Be.]