Friday, Sep 5, 2008
"B sides" and the noncommercially oriented tracks that fill out a given album have always been the artistic payoff. Unlike the A sides, the B's can be far more subtle, complex, varied in length, and even irreverent, offensive, or disturbing -- all potential marks of innovation. The Beatles set the standard: After "Rubber Soul," it was clear that Lennon and McCartney were heading down different roads. In a sense, the high fixed costs were incurred for McCartney's innocuous and commercially friendly love ballads on the A sides, while the group was able to be musically daring with Lennon's more avant-garde and experimental compositions.
There's more than just anecdotal evidence that the B side is where creativity lurks. A sides are faithfully more standardized than their counterparts. Out of a sample of 200 popular singles released in the fall of 2000, B sides, sometimes as short as 30 seconds and as long as 22 minutes, were much more varied in length than the A's. Out of another sample of more than 20,000 singles, the number of professional songwriters employed for the A's was higher than 1,200, whereas for B's, fewer than 300 pieces were the work of professionals.
While 1,055 A sides were covers of other artists' hits, only 80 B sides were covers. Songs chosen for covers are usually pretty simple in composition and conceptualization. Thus, songs picked for covers typically have both accessibility and general, but not intense, likability. Also, since covers are remakes, they are obviously more standardized than non-covers.
Even in some of the most hackneyed genres of pop music, bundled innovation has flourished; musicians have attached riskier pieces onto sure-bets to expose and get feedback on their more precarious ideas.
But it won't always be that way: Apple's newly released iTunes allows individual songs to be downloaded, with good-enough sound quality, for a mere 99 cents. This is good for business but bad for music.
While artists and labels may now be worrying less about losing revenue to digital copycats, iTunes is de-bundling music. After the first week of iTunes' implementation, Apple reported that half the total songs purchased were parts of albums, but if you think about it, that's not a big deal. With roughly 12 or more pieces per album, that's a lot fewer albums sold than single songs. NPD Techworld analyst Stephen Baker wasn't surprised that album sales were strong in the beginning -- "When people move to a new format, one of the first things they want to do is get albums from their favorite artists, like the Eagles or Nirvana, in the new format." Since most people's favorite music is stuff that's been around, this won't do anything to foster innovation in new music.
For new music, consumers might still buy some full albums, but it won't match the buying of albums on CD. iTunes makes it too easy and cheap to be selective -- a CD single frequently costs upwards of $4 and more, but an iTunes single costs less than a buck, and there's good reason to think the price will go even lower. Plus only one or two songs from an album are usually sold in the single format, but iTunes lets you buy many, if not all, of the artist's songs separately. Consumers can buy exactly what they want, and no more.
Instead of tunes that were able to dodge the traditional commercially oriented gatekeepers by being attached to other tunes that did follow the rules of the game, each individual iTunes will be subject to the pressures of mass appeal. Consumers will likely purchase songs they know from radio, and thus become subject to the whims of programmers who are governed by commercial, not artistic, interests. iTunes allows a 30-second preview of songs, but we know that some of the best tunes don't even get going in that time. The 30-second preview just reinforces the need for each tune to be catchy and pleasing right up front.
Consumers of iTunes won't be able to sample for free other full pieces by the musician, and so will bypass the chief passage to the musician's more remote work. And in turn, with the growing popularity of iTunes, producers of music will be inhibited from taking musical risks since each piece will need to stand alone.
For now, this digital option and others like it complement the hardware world of CDs, with many consumers still buying CDs; but as online music sales grow, the sale of CDs will continue to decline, and digital music will come to reign supreme. When this happens, we can expect very little bundled innovation -- making the artistry of bands like the Beatles, the Doors and Tool potentially a thing of the past.
This story has been corrected since it was originally posted.
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