Monday, May 12, 2008
As songs are increasingly sold one by one online, the musical creativity and risk-taking associated with the album format will decline.
Jun 18, 2003 | I bought Tool's most recent album, "Lateralus," because I couldn't get the harsh yet slightly ethereal guitar of "Schism" out of my head. The repetition of its play on a hard-rock station, like the repetition of the final guitar segment, had me whipped. After listening to the song over and over, I turned to the other tunes on the album where, I discovered, the real integrity and uniqueness of Tool's artistry resided. In the end, my favorite song on the album, and perhaps the best by any measure, is a track I have never heard on the radio.
Sound familiar? How many times have you bought a band's album for an overplayed song, only to discover that the more gratifying tunes are the ones you've never heard before? But now that iTunes and other online music vendors have finally arrived, don't expect to experience that same epiphany in the future. iTunes is helping to usher in an era where songs are sold individually, thus putting an end to what I call "bundled innovations."
The idea is based on simple economics: To sell any song on hardware -- whether vinyl or CD -- artists and labels have to incur a high one-time, or fixed, cost; but after that, more songs can be added at very low additional, or marginal, costs. To cover those high fixed costs, musicians are encouraged to create prosaic pieces that target as large an audience as possible, but then the low marginal costs for additional songs mean they can take a gamble on other, more original and creative tunes.
Music bundling means that the sure things that are catchy but utterly forgettable, together with the not-so-sure things that can surprise and sometimes nourish our artistic hunger, both end up in the hands of consumers and critics -- who can then sample the latter for free. This exposure of chancy ideas is a great boon to the creative process. But because of the discrete selling and buying of music, digital single by digital single, that iTunes and its kin will foster, we can expect a decline in music bundling, and thus in risk-taking and its shy companion, innovation.
The music biz has been here before: during the brain-dead era of the 45. In the 1950s and early '60s, the 45 was the medium of choice for popular music. The problem, at least for innovation, was that the 45 only allowed up to three minutes of recording on each side. This limitation on space sent the marginal cost of selling music soaring and forced record labels to view the B side as another vehicle for mass-appeal music, and not as a stage on which to experiment. Since there were only two pieces released at a time, B sides were targeted for radio play and for popular consumption in the same way that A sides were. Not surprisingly, most two-sided hits in the Billboards rankings are from before the use of the LP, eight-track, and cassette.
The ultimate in bundled innovations occurred when the main product emphasis shifted from the single to the album, from the 45 to the LP and cassette. This technological shift paralleled the taking off of rock. Once the 45 straitjacket was broken, creativity and bundled innovations blossomed.
Today, armored by the tried and true, musicians can take a crack at the risky in a market where loyalties are shiftier than the Bush administration's stance on Iraq's WMD. For instance, on the B side of their popular singles, Sarah McLachlan and Tori Amos have released songs that are stylistically and thematically unlike the pieces on the full album. (Even though the singles are actually additional cuts on the same "side" of a CD single, they are still referred to, in the business, as B sides).
Many musicians bundle covers of old popular songs with their own pieces to establish themselves. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were resolutely underground until they decided to cover Stevie Wonder's "Higher Ground" and get some MTV airplay. Love and Rockets did the same with The Temptation's "Ball of Confusion." The Rolling Stones' transitional period is characterized by two albums, "Out of Our Heads" and "December's Children." Both contained many popular R&B covers along with their new ideas, which continued to flourish over the next five albums.
With nothing to lose, artists might throw in some junk to see how it stands in the view of consumers and critics. And even if the artist doesn't intend to test an idea, an innovation can emerge from the filler. The Who's Pete Townshend wrote and tied together four three-minute songs on the end of the band's second album essentially just to extend the length of the album. What resulted was a mini-opera, the first "rock opera," titled "A Quick One While He's Away," which, some critics claim, launched the band into recognition.
To take just one platform for popular music, singles are still notoriously one-dimensional -- that is, at least the A sides are. This is because the A side is overwhelmingly targeted for radio and MTV play so that it ranks high on the Billboard Top Charts. Radio programmers might only listen to three or four seconds of a song before liking it or tossing it. So the A side has to have an immediate emotional impact, and its length has to fit the formulaic length of three to four minutes. We all know that popular songs have a standard structure: They don't take long to get the overall feel and direction of a tune established -- usually no more than 10 to 20 seconds -- and then they don't deviate from it.
What it all comes down to is this: For a record to be played and make the rankings, mass appeal and inclusiveness are essential ingredients. "It's a mass-appeal game, not a novelty game," an executive at a major record label conceded to me. This doesn't mean commercial music is all bad -- I confess, I've given in, more than once, to the likes of "Oops I Did It Again." Mainstream hit singles can resonate, they can be fun, and they can just be plain good. But let's not confuse that with risk-taking in art.
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