Dani Paige Band:

Everyone knows the music industry is in upheaval right now. Almost everything is changing, and there's endless talk about what it all means, so allow me to contribute to the endlessness.

Because of the growth of online digital sales of music, more and more people are opting to buy individual songs rather than entire albums. Bob Lefsetz opines that albums as a concept are on their way out; you can read his thoughts on the subject here. I halfway disagree, so I wrote him back, and my response is below.

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I agree, the new technology has allowed us to take a hard look at the album model. And at the moment it looks like you're right, most people don't want albums, especially because most artists can't come up with more than one really great track.  

But I don't see the album completely disappearing because there's nothing wrong with the concept, and it has a lot to offer devoted music fans.  If you really like an artist or band and they're able to produce 45 minutes of great material, you want to hear it all. The paroxysm happening in the record business right now may cause many people to throw the album baby out with the filler track bathwater, but once we get past the initial stage, maybe we'll be back where we were in the early 60s: singles will rule pop, but artists who have more to say and want to go deeper will still make albums, and their fans will buy them.  I'm happy to pay $10 for an album from iTunes if it's good stuff.

There are analogies. The most obvious one is vinyl -- back in 1992, who in the industry thought that vinyl sales would be growing rapidly (even if absolute numbers are small) in 2010?  Probably nobody. But after almost everybody got away from vinyl for a while, some people realized that it still had something to offer, so they went back to it voluntarily. I saw a bunch of LPs for sale at Borders the other day, for cryin' out loud. Here's another: vacuum tubes. They were in everything in the 50s, and then transistors came in and for a minute it looked like they would completely replace tubes because of cost and convenience. To a very large extent that happened, and there are virtually no consumer electronic devices that have tubes any more. But Fender never stopped making tube-based guitar amplifiers, and in the last 10-15 years there has been an unbelievable renaissance in tube audio gear for the professional market, because it's a classic sound you can't get any other way. At this point, there are SCADS of people making a living by building boutique tube amps, studio signal processors, etc... which means there are even more scads of people buying this stuff.  Admittedly, these are people who are devoted to performing and recording music, but the analogy holds because I'm interested in having my music reach people who are devoted to listening to music.

So albums may be going out of style right now, but they'll be back, even if the excesses of the 1990s won't be.

Jesse DeCarlo