iTunes Helping To Save The Album

The online era has created a scary trend within music listeners. Songs are becoming much more important than the albums they come from. This has been a dream come true for the casual listeners who loooooove the song they heard on the radio but don't have time to waste listening to any of the other songs on the album that don't have a platinum-selling-single seal of consumer approval. This trend creates a scary possibilty for the future of music, one where the Album is dead and in its place is fragments of songs that made it up. This trend is already showing up more and more in singles being sought out by listeners after appearing in movies, tv shows, commercials, or the ever so popular MTV and radio. While this theme is perplexing, I'm not very worried because it seems good bands continue to use the concept of the album to convey more complex stories and themes than can be told in just one song (and I'm not just talking about My Chemical Romance concept albums).

Apparently, I'm not the only one that thinks this way as iTunes is changing its policy on buying albums. Using their Complete My Album function you can buy the rest of an album from a single you've already purchase without having to pay for that song twice. In the past, you could buy as many single songs as you wanted off an album but if you wanted the whole thing you had to pay the full price. Now, you only have to pay for the songs you don't already own. While it seems like a small deal, I believe it will have a strong effect on people buying whole albums after liking single songs. This will have a strong effect on how musicians distribute, and in the long run, make music. Hopefully we'll be treated to the musical collection format that has brought some of the most amazing and epic concepts in music history.

Radio UTD Charts for 3/27/07

Sorry for the lapse in charts from the past couple weeks, there have been some problems with the station's CMJ submissions so here are the most played albums of Radio UTD of the last week:

1 TRANS AM Sex Change Thrill Jockey
2 MEW Frengers Columbia
3 OF MONTREAL Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? Polyvinyl
4 HUXTABLES A Touch Of Wonder Famous Class
5 DO MAKE SAY THINK You, You're A History In Rust Constellation
6 ARCADE FIRE Neon Bible Merge
7 PETER BJORN AND JOHN Writer's Block Almost Gold
8 STOOGES The Weirdness Virgin
9 LOW Drums And Guns Sub Pop
10 JOAKIM Monsters And Silly Songs Versatile
11 ANDREW BIRD Armchair Apochrypha Fat Possum
12 BROTHERS MARTIN The Brothers Martin Tooth And Nail
13 ILLINOIS What The Hell Do I Know? Ace Fu
14 EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone Temporary Residence
15 LCD SOUNDSYSTEM Sound Of Silver Capitol
16 EL-P I'll Sleep When You're Dead Definitive Jux
17 YOKO ONO Yes, I'm A Witch Astralwerks
18 PANDA BEAR Person Pitch Paw Tracks
19 MINMAE 835 Greyday
20 YOUTH GROUP Casino Twilight Dogs Anti
21 OOIOO Eye Remix [EP] Thrill Jockey
22 JARVIS COCKER Jarvis Rough Trade
23 AIR Pocket Symphony Astralwerks
24 I'M FROM BARCELONA Let Me Introduce My Friends Mute
25 GRUFF RHYS Candylion Team Love
26 HIGH LLAMAS Can Cladders Drag City
27 MODEST MOUSE We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank Epic
28 ROSIE THOMAS These Friends Of Mine Nettwerk
29 ELVIS PERKINS Ash Wednesday XL
30 MY TEENAGE STRIDE Ears Like Golden Bats Becalmed

Out of all of these I'd like to focus on El-P, who's newest album "I'll Sleep When You're Dead" is arguably the best hip hop album of the year. This album is rich, dark, and explosive. Textures flow through the songs recalling artists as diverse as Air, the Mars Volta (who actually appear on the album), and Run DMC while still having a distincy dirty hip hop vibe. The album is as much Young Jeezy as it is Madlib. This album has a definite epic feel to it, recalling a post-apocalyptic dystopia full of a strange blend of rage and apathy. Click here and filter through the non el-p tracks to check out some of his stuff. I think all fans of hip hop or of interesting music for that matter can really take a lot from this amazing new album.

NEWS: Only One Fourth of Students Threatened By RIAA Pay

Apparently, of the 400 or so students sued only around 100 of them have responded to the RIAA's threats against them. As seen in the Merchant case, these letters have no legal weight and most students recognize this. It's still to be seen how the RIAA will respond to this non-reaction. If they can identify students to IP addresses and can confirm they are the ones sharing the music, the lawsuits they could create would be disastrous. Only time will tell if the RIAA's bite is as big as its bark.

NEWS: Lawyer Fights Back Against RIAA

In what seems to be the current trend of late, the RIAA is being met with resistance to their pleas for money from supposed perpetrators in the war against music piracy. Barry and Cathy Merchant were recently sent a letter from the RIAA claiming that they had infringed copyright law. They were given the option to settle for $3750 (they don't get the student discount). Instead of complying blindly, their lawyer Merl Ledford has written a counterpoint to the RIAA claiming that not only is the RIAA's threat letter unfounded, it is also illegal in a court of law. According to the RIAA, the Merchants had been downloading and uploading a lot of gangster rap, which according to Ledford is preposterous considering the Merchants are a middle aged, conservative couple with no possession of music anything like that. Beyond that, the letter has about as much validity as an insurance company attempting you to use their services. You can read Ledford's letter here. As expected, the RIAA has dropped their case against the couple.

NEWS: Ringtone Sales Predicted to Decline

According to BMI, one of the most meaningless music markets will be declining in 2007. The sale of ringtones will decrease in the US in the current year according to analysts within BMI. Last year saw record sales, peaking at $600 million. According to their analysts, this year's sales are predicted to drop to a meager $550 million. Supposedly, the decline is a direct response to the increasing amount of real content available on cell phones as opposed to simple ring tones. How this market ever reached millions in revenue, let alone hundreds of millions in revenue is beside me. Don't fret just yet though, cell phone music clip investors, the ringback market is apparently on the rise in 2007. Read more here.

NEWS: Two Schools Fight Back Against RIAA

There has been an interesting turn of events in the RIAA vs college students battle of late. Apparently two of the colleges with students being sued have decided to fight back in their own ways. The University of Wisconsin has said that it refuses to divulge the names of the students being sought. It will only comply if the RIAA gets a subpoena from a judge to divulge the information. Even more interesting is the University of Nebraska who cannot comply because their IP addresses are reset each month leaving no way of identifying the students in question. Apparently that answer isn't good enough for the RIAA considering a spokesperson criticized the university for not keeping this information. Obviously upset with the criticism and the nagging the University of Nebraska has demanded that the RIAA pay them for their wasted time in this case. Hopefully other universities will follow suit in defending their students from the clutches of the RIAA and their cronies.

NEWS: FCC Fixes the Payola Problem (cough)

Yes! They've done it. Those millions of air-hours dedicated to the praise of useless talent like Jessica Simpson and Fergie in part thanks to the vast amounts of bribes given illegaly by labels to radio DJ's will be recompensated. CBS Radio, Clear Channel Communications, Citadel Broadcasting, and Entercom Communications, aka the four biggest names in radio have come up with a solution to repay you, the listeners for having to deal with the amount of crap you've had to listen to recently. Apparently, they will offer up 4,200 hours of local and independent music free of charge to the artists between the four of them. This is not 4,200 per station per year, it is a one time agreement where the four major companies and the hundreds of stations they own will play a combined 4,200 hours in the near future. Problem with that is most stations already have an hour long show or so per week focusing on this type of music, making the damages completely useless since they will be naturally fulfilled. YAY! Radio has been saved from the evil beast that is the major labels and we will soon be on track for a new golden age of radio full of new and exciting bands! With amazing David vs Goliath cases like this one it's only obvious that the powers that be have heard our plight and are more than willing to help. That is if what you want happens to be Bowling for Soup and Blue October for a few weeks until even they get reduced to their average spins per week and Nickelback and Sheryl Crow regair their rightful 93,200,393,920,022 spins per week. Oh by the way that last number isn't confirmed and this article is dripping with sarcasm if you couldn't tell already.

Blanket Licenses as Music's Future

At a SXSW '07 panel Peter Jennings, the manager of The Clash, Pink Floyd, and others as well as Cambridge educated economist stated that the future of music should be a blanket license. If each music listener pays an annual fee of $50, the music industry as a whole would make more money than it currently does while ending the frustrations caused by old world vs new world complications with DRM, licensing, and pricing. Unfortunately, current models and conceptions within the RIAA will probably keep this from being a possibility in the near future. In my opinion the best method for this to happen would be at the hands of pirates. If they can make an illegal but easy option then major labels would have no choice but attempt to capitalize on its success and evetually we may eventually hit this utopian music ideal where everyone gets paid and music is easily heard by everybody. Only time will tell...

UPDATE: Ohio University Students Sued

As promised, the RIAA begun its string of university based lawsuits in the humble state of Ohio. Fifty Ohio University students were served lawsuits based on their university e-mail accounts. All of these can be settled for a "mere" $3,000. This might sound ridiculous but in fact it could be a generous offer when each copyright infringing song offered via p2p can be legally worth $750. For example, one Ohio University student had 787 music files shared illegally making their case worth over $600,000 if settled in court.

Death to the Radio!!!

Music is arguably one of the greatest achievements us as humans have ever created. The ability to manipulate air into desirable frequencies that our ears can decipher and analyze into recognizable patterns is perhaps one of our crowning achievements as homo-sapiens. Our methods of sharing music have changed greatly over the past few millennia. In the beginning everything was shared from person to person. You, or a group, played a song and your audience heard you. Around a hundred years ago that all changed. With Edison’s invention we were able to record our sounds and play them back at our discretion. From there the methods of recording changed, as did the ways of spreading them. Arguably the most critical invention in the sharing of music was the radio. For the first time a nearly unlimited number of people could listen to the exact same thing even if they weren’t in the immediate proximity of you. Radio brought everyone together, and suddenly there was a musical renaissance with new genres being created and expanded almost instantaneously. It wasn’t until the advent of MTV that “video killed the radio star” and brought something that had as much power over the musical landscape. Despite that radio was strong and while that eventually led to a marketing fueled stagnation of the music world, it still was an almost necessary method of distributing music to a mass audience. That’s why it’s kind of sad to say that radio is seeing its last days.

This might sound like a brash statement but unfortunately it is an almost certain one. Once again the technology gods have spoken and from their murmurs a new muse has emerged… the Internet. Well, not exactly the Internet, but the Internet era. Ever since music was digitized to CD and then to hard drive, the radio era has been forced to look in terror to the horizon. What made radio so great was the ability to listen to hundreds of artists with a tying link (even if that was the simple choice of the DJ) that still had some variety to them. Even if you had to pay with your listening time due to commercials, radio has always been a free commodity for those who can afford receivers, something that no other medium could afford. The Internet changed all of that by allowing people to pick and choose their favorites from… well everything. They could create their own radio stations in the form of playlists and create a mix that suits their personal needs for everything from throwing a party to studying. And while steps have been taken to legalize a lot of the downloading necessary (for music that isn’t legally ripped from CDs) for these mixes, most music is still freely exchanged over p2p networks and less than reputable sites. This may sound like common knowledge to anyone under the age of 26 who hasn’t been hiding under a rock, but not good enough reason for the demise of the radio.

To be totally honest “radio” will not die, the transmission of information via radio frequencies will still remain, they will just be digital instead of analog. And I’m not talking about satellite radio or HD radio. There is no reason to ignore the fact that odds are, in a few years, there will be wireless internet access nationwide in America (or at least in major driving/living areas) much like current cellular networks. What’s been keeping radio in business is mainly the car. Most people can’t use their computers with them in their cars and people’s mp3 players often have the music that they are limited to, not the “random” selections presented by radio stations. As wireless networks, on-demand music services, and portable (car installed) mini-computers become more available people could have an almost endless amount of music with them at any given time. With this, there would be no reason to sit through commercials, or even unfavorable songs. The DJ of the future should be intelligent playlisting. Imagine, you turn on your car and put on a song you’ve been in the mood to hear. For the next song you can choose your style of repetition, continue playing that album, that artist, similar era, similar subgenre, genre, mood, or just have it go to another song that you like. You could skip songs that you don’t want to hear or just choose another song from scratch. All of these playlisting options are available through music services like Napster and Rhapsody. These intelligent playlists would allow people to discover new music while not having to venture too far into territory they don’t want to. I actually know a man who has built a system like this in his own car (only it has integrated streaming video as well) using cellular technology. His broad concept only cost around $1400 to make from scratch along with around $140 a month in fees. While some audiophiles are willing to pay that much for a standard car stereo with market production these costs would of course go down dramatically and most people don’t need the streaming video services. Feasibly someone could buy a $300 LCD/HDD receiver and with a reasonable $40 monthly wireless subscription and $30 music library subscription to create this system on current technologies and even more streamlined in near-future technologies. Of course, with all predictions, there is a high possibility that things will not pan out this way but there is no reason for it not to happen considering the easy transition time and marketability. As with many other situations globally, human intervention is becoming less and less necessary or desirable. In the next decade the radio as we know it could be dead, and the DJ of old replaced with the data tags, infrastructure, and you.