The Captured Perspective

Yesterday, one of Pitchfork’s strongest writers and the author of one of my favorite blogs, Eric Harvey, contributed “The Social History of the MP3,” a long-ass article discussing the many aspects of how the digital format affected music this decade. For me, the most fascinating aspect of reading this piece was that I lived it, and unless you’re a toddler, you did too.

Remember downloading songs off of Napster? How about Kazaa? Remember asking friends to burn you a CD because you were too cheap to buy it yourself? Did you ever pass music through AIM or access another user’s “getfile”? Or maybe you used Ourtunes to download from other iTunes users at your dorm or in the college library. Were you on Oink? Or maybe you were bolder (dumber), accessing torrents from free sites like The Pirate Bay. Maybe you’ve downloaded music from a blog via a public hosting site like MediaFire, SendSpace, or RapidShare. Perhaps you’ve been a member of a message board, facebook/google/yahoo group, or just an email chain where music was passed around. Have you ever listened to a full day’s worth of music for free at The Hype Machine, Pandora, Last.fm, or YouTube? Or maybe you’re one of the good ones, buying MP3s from the iTunes, eMusic, or Amazon music stores. REMEMBER WHEN NONE OF THIS CRAP EXISTED?

Today, Rob Mitchum’s perfect 10.0 review of the Special Collectors Edition of Radiohead’s seminal work, Kid A, echoed Harvey’s piece in its opening paragraph:

We used to listen to music in an entirely different way. There was once a time when music was organized into 45- to 75-minute chunks—often a few standout tracks padded with a lot of mediocre filler, but occasionally designed so that the parts built up a larger structure. Used to be, people would sit down and listen to that lengthy piece of music from front to back in one sitting, resisting the urge to jump to their favorite parts or skip over the instrumental interlude that served as grout between two fuller compositions. These antiques were called CDs. Here’s a story about the last of its kind.

Combined, the two articles spurned a great deal of thought in my puny brain as to what the future of music may look like. Hence, this post.

. . .

For the last century, technology has often dictated how artists—who actually create (!) the music we listen to—think about their craft. When 45s were introduced to the general public, a 7-inch vinyl record only large enough to fit one song on each side, the “single” saw its heyday. Kids wouldn’t have the cash to buy an entire LP (“Long Player”), but for chump change, they could get “Hey Jude” (which, amazingly, was never actually on a Beatles’ album). Thus, so many of rock n roll’s earliest stars ignored the idea of an “album,” and focused instead on churning out as many strong singles as possible (see, for example, Elvis’ discography).

But when technology changed, so did music itself. As Wikipedia so eloquently puts it:

As the LP achieved market dominance, musicians and producers began to pay special attention to the flow from song-to-song, to keep a consistent mood or feel, or to provide thematic continuity, as in concept albums.

The rise of the album as we know it was really therefore a direct spawn of the vinyl record itself, perhaps why the terms “album,” “record,” and “LP” are still used interchangeably today. Only the wealthy and obsessive could afford many records, so it was common practice for fans to play their newest buy on repeat. Ask your parents how many times they listened to their least favorite vinyl record, and I bet it’s twice as many times as you’ve played your 10th favorite computer-downloaded one (let alone the huge number we download—just because we can—and never get to).

Moreover, and to the point of that Wikipedia quote, because the standard vinyl side runs for only 23-minutes, bands and musicians had to consider the format itself when recording and sequencing their songs. Take Abbey Road, a record I’ll assume most readers have heard at one time or another. Side A closes with “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” which feels remarkably heavy as it repeats the same riff for its final three minutes, before ending abruptly. Side B begins anew with “Here Comes the Sun,” one of the sunniest bits of music in the band’s late catalog. For anyone who has only heard Abbey Road in CD or MP3 format, it should now be self-explanatory why these two songs appear back to back, why “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” is seemingly placed out-of-place in the middle of the record, and why vinyl as a format mattered to the artists. Many bands experimented with the “sides” of their albums to create two (or four) sub-albums. To use another Beatles’ example, The White Album couldn’t seem more arbitrarily arranged in your iTunes window, but listening to it on vinyl can feel like playing four separate records.

Rather than alter the way artists thought about the album, cassettes did more for the fans, harkening a time to come when making our own mixtapes would be commonplace. Still, their 30-45 minutes per side and cheaper production costs meant that longer albums could be released for a fraction of the price.

The late 80s brought the Compact Disc’s dominance over all other music formats, an era which Mitchum claims more or less ended with Radiohead’s Kid A. With singles long gone, so too did “sides” go the wayside. Sure, most pop artists still cared more about racking up radio hits, but some damn fine albums came out in the one-slab CD format, altering the way musicians and bands once again thought about crafting the larger piece of art. Case in point: album listeners/critics now widely prefer roughly 35-45 minute run-times (as Mitchum’s review confirms), and anything over an hour is regularly referred to as “bloated.” Tell that to The White Album (1 hour, 34 minutes), Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1 hour, 21 minutes), or hell, The Clash’s Sandanista! (2 hours, 25 minutes).

At times, however, artists have refused to be boxed in by the CD format. Two examples come to mind. First, The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka attempted to give the listener more control over how their music sounded:

Released on October 28, 1997, the experimental rock album consists of four compact discs. Each of its eight songs consists of four stereo tracks, one from each CD. The album was designed so that when played simultaneously on four separate audio systems, the four CDs would produce a harmonic or juxtaposed sound. The discs may be included in different combinations, omitting one, two or three discs.

While forward thinking, how many people have two stereo systems, let alone four? (Not to mention the thing kind of sucks no matter which records you choose to play). The second example is Ryan Adams & The Cardinals’ Cold Roses. Despite the fact that he could have fit the bloated album (see what I did there?) onto a single 80-minute compact disc, Adams chose to release it as a double-disc set, “designed to make it look like a vinyl LP.” Perhaps he preferred us to think of it as two separate albums, or maybe he was just nostalgic for the past. Regardless, neither of these gimmicky ideas ended with many CDs sold.

. . .

The MP3 has effectively demolished the CD industry. Brief tangent: Oddly, that last sentence could have read “music industry,” and you wouldn’t have flinched. It’s been argued before that it was the big labels own damn fault for resisting change, rather than offering what the fans wanted: a high-quality, DRM-free, cheap, and vast library, akin to what Oink had before it got shut down (see: DJ/ rupture’s phenomenal blog post “Defending the Pig” from 10/2007).

But what effect has the MP3 had on the artists themselves? Most obviously, the single has re-risen as the dominant format. Who would run out and purchase the new Britney record when you can legally download “Womanizer” and “Circus” for a couple of bucks on iTunes? Does anyone care about the last few songs?

As for the future, who better to show us the way than the band that gave us the last “pure” CD? Radiohead’s most recent album, In Rainbows, was announced exactly 10 days prior to its release as a digital download in October of 2008 (just about one year after the demise of Oink). Lead singer Thom Yorke would later explain:

“Every record for the last four—including my solo record—has been leaked. So the idea was like, we’ll leak it, then.”

Even better, anyone who wanted to download the thing got to choose their own price. I paid $0 for it, felt kind of bad for five minutes, and then forgot I ever cared. Some people I know paid as much as $20 and bought the physical CD when it came out three months later. As amazing as this whole plan still seems today, the true genius was that the band knew the record would still sell well when they officially released it. In many ways, the pay-what-you-want idea was just another promotional tool (and a damn good one) to bolster excitement for CD sales.

Instead of repeating their success, however, the band is choosing a different approach. In a recent interview with The Believer (which also, by the way, includes a comparison of the MP3 and the 50s single market), Yorke said:

“None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again. Not straight off. I mean, it’s just become a real drag. It worked with In Rainbows because we had a real fixed idea about where we were going. But we’ve all said that we can’t possibly dive into that again. It’ll kill us.”

In the last few weeks, the band has put its money where its mouth is, by releasing two digital download singles, “Harry Patch (In Memory Of)” and “These Are My Twisted Words.” The former is available for just a one pound donation to the Royal British Legion, the latter, for free.

No one seems to be talking about this in the grandiose manner everyone did for the In Rainbows release, but personally, I think this could be what’s next in the timeline. Why would bands continue to go through the costly and time-consuming pains of making cohesive albums, selecting (and usually paying royalties for) cover art, and getting a label to manufacture their work, when no one cares enough to pay for the end product anyway? The only people that regularly obtain full CDs anymore are those like me—the ones who download more albums in a fortnight than our parents ever dreamed they’d own in their lifetimes.

. . .

I used to argue with those that only listened to single songs that they were missing the bigger picture. “It’s like looking at only a 2×2-inch spot on a huge canvas of paint,” I’d say. After all, most of Kid A doesn’t sound much like “Idioteque,” and to only hear that single track would be a damn shame—that’s Mitchum’s whole point.

But what if CDs, LPs, albums, et al. had it all wrong? What if the future of music is just 100 singles on iPod Shuffles? Will the MP3′s ultimate legacy be to drown the “album” format for one more easily digestible? Only time will tell.