After a decade of the iTunes Store, the full-length album persists - The Star-Ledger - NJ.com

Yes, the industry has changed. But the full-length album isn't going anywhere.   After the digital doors of Apple's iTunes Store first swung open nearly 10 years ago — April 28, 2003 — obituaries were penned for the full-length album. Why would a consumer bother to download a complete set when he could cherry-pick tracks from a vast database of songs? Why listen to a suite in the order presented by its author when play lists allowed the listener to sequence songs however she saw fit? Who would ever pay attention to album art or liner notes when all music existed as transferable files in vast virtual space? The album was doomed. Since then, iTunes has sold more than 25 billion songs and driven all but the hardiest retail record shops out of business. Getting songs in the iTunes Store has become the goal of every artist determined to turn a profit and every nascent independent record label looking for commercial traction. Prominent placement in the store's New and Noteworthy sections can help launch an artist's career. The iTunes Store has become a tastemaker, an aggregator, a distributor without borders. Yet it hasn't undone the album. Artists continue to make them, popular websites and publications continue to review them, and fans continue to listen to them (and, often, in the intended sequence). The physical form of the album — the CD, the LP, the cassette — may be fading into obsolescence. But the album as an idea — a collection of songs by a single act, sold as a package and meant to capture a moment in the development of an artist — persists. Instead of eroding the foundations of the album, the iTunes Store model has helped to preserve them. Artists have enticed consumers to buy full-lengths by offering album-only content through the store — not just songs, but also videos, apps, behind-the-scenes clips and other exclusive downloads. "With everything digital, it makes it easier to create different packages," says Yinka Adegoke, deputy editor of Billboard magazine. "In modern music, one of the things that's pushed hard is the brand of the artist. You want to have the whole thing that the artist offers, and not just a slice of it." While the free-for-all atmosphere of digital downloading seemed liberating at first, those in the business of selling music relearned the lesson of the mid-'60s: full-length sets were a better bet than singles. "The way the record industry works is that all the profits are in the albums," Adegoke says. "All the promotions are based around the album. Everyone gets hurt if you strip everything down." But financial considerations alone couldn't have kept the album alive in an era of options and listener control. Young artists — many of whom grew up in a culture of downloading — might have been expected to abandon the full-length set. Nothing of the sort has happened. The most serious, well-respected artists in every genre of popular music continue to conceptualize and craft thoughtful, coherent full-lengths. "The album started becoming important to me around the age of 17," says Joe Michelini of Toms River's River City Extension, one of the most promising young acts in the Garden State. "I realized that music is about context. The album allows the artist to put you in a place for a certain length of time." In country music, young singers like Miranda Lambert and Taylor Swift obsess over sequencing and internal variation among songs, and work to make their stories resonate with each other. Budding hip-hop artists look to the classic album as an idealized standard; Kendrick Lamar, a 25-year-old emcee, earned ecstatic reviews and an international audience for last year's "Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City," an hour-long narrative about life in Compton, Calif. Amusing one-off's such as Psy's "Gangnam Style" continue to climb the charts. But other writers acknowledge that some topics are too complex to be addressed, or even approached, in three minutes. "I think an LP should be a linear experience in the same way that a movie or book is," says Patrick Stickles of Glen Rock's Titus Andronicus, a band that released "The Monitor," an acclaimed 2010 full-length that grappled with the Civil War, literature and the history of New Jersey. "A single song can be an expansive and immersive world for sure, but on an album, you've got opportunities for character development. I like to think of songs like chapters in a novel." Stickles, like other ambitious young artists, believes that the internet has been a boon for conceptualists — and for fans of concept albums, too. "The 45-minute complete statement album was born out of the necessity of the restrictions of vinyl," Stickles says. "That's not really a factor anymore. Music that lives digitally doesn't have any restrictions on how expansive it can be." "I think it's important for a band like ours to do an album," says Michelini of River City Extension, whose 2012 release "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Your Anger" was an engrossing chronicle of an emotional trajectory. "I'd never look down on bands that don't, but the chance to tell a story is too important to me." The full-length has made the leap to digital media with surprising grace. With thousands of options available to listeners in the iTunes Store and elsewhere, the album serves as the initial unit of categorization that helps impose some structure on the landslide of music that confronts contemporary consumers. Spotify, a subscription-based website that allows music to be streamed to multiple devices, has made album listening the backbone of its service. And Spotify's widespread popularity has been pushing iTunes to alter its model. Could the album actually outlast the store that was supposed to make it an anachronism? "In another 10 years, the iTunes Store will still be selling music in some form," Adegoke says. "It will also probably evolve and become something like a Spotify or iRadio subscription service, because that's where the market is going. But some people will still buy downloads for the same reason that many people still buy vinyl. "Nothing ever really dies anymore." via Technology - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNFUezpUREYBSWP_CehQAeWVaVOz7g&url=http://www.nj.com/entertainment/music/index.ssf/2013/04/after_a_decade_of_the_itunes_s.html

Put the internet to work for you. via Personal Recipe 2598265