The Wall Street Journal-20080127-Real Time- Beyond the Album- 2007 Brings New Signs That the Era Of a Beloved Musical Form Is Ending- Online edition

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Real Time: Beyond the Album; 2007 Brings New Signs That the Era Of a Beloved Musical Form Is Ending; Online edition

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The CD, that venerable container for pop songs, may not be dead. But those who hold it dear have been asked to assemble.

Earlier this month, Nielsen Soundscan released 2007 data painting yet another portrait of a music industry struggling to make the transition to a more-uncertain, less-profitable business model. For the year, overall units sold rose 14% -- and sales of digital tracks rose 45%. But not all units are created equal: Total album sales fell 15%, and that blow was softened by a 53% rise in sales of digital albums. Subtract digital-album sales, and physical-album sales declined 19%, to 450.5 million in 2007 from 555.6 million in 2006. (Dig into the numbers yourself here.)

Or, if you prefer, take this arresting anecdote from the Economist (found via Nate Anderson's interesting read, in the always-great Ars Technica): In 2006 EMI honchos invited some London teens to the label's headquarters to discuss their listening habits. By way of thanks, the kids were offered whatever they wanted from a big pile of CDs. Offered free CDs, the kids took . . . nothing.

An apparently blind Lower East Side bouncer aside, nobody's mistaken me for young in years -- but I'm on the kids' side here. I've come to regard my physical CDs as ungainly plastic receipts, shut away in boxes as proof that my older MP3 files weren't swiped from BitTorrent. And even that marks me as old: Last weekend I bought a pair of used CDs for the first time in I don't know when (something I used to do weekly), and the only person in the store obviously under 30 was the surlier-than-thou clerk.

Determining what killed the CD is kind of playing "Clue" in reverse -- what didn't contribute to its demise? I don't doubt that piracy deserves some blame, though I do doubt it's to the extent that the music industry believes. Those obsessed with piracy tend to miss the decline of music retailers, an increasingly hits-driven record industry, and the inescapable fact that technology has given us many more ways to spend our time. (Sitting in a dark room listening to music? Why that's . . . singletasking!)

Then there's the medium itself: In the digital age, physical CDs have become a clumsy way to package songs, a plastic spacesuit for the journey between the digital environment of record-company servers and the digital environment of a consumer's PC, iPod or phone. Now throw in the fact that consumers have resented the music-CD formats for years, deriding CDs as typically a couple of good songs and a bunch of filler, or asking why a movie soundtrack often costs more than the movie itself. Call the first contention unfair and the second ignorant of the different economics of the movie and music industries if you wish, but good luck convincing consumers in your local Best Buy.

The music industry likes to say the CD can't compete with free, but that's missing the point. The real problem -- as those kids showed EMI so devastatingly -- is that the physical increasingly can't compete with the digital. (Or maybe they didn't care about Coldplay and Robbie Williams.) The music industry's experiments with various new CD formats -- the CD-View Plus, ringle, etc. -- are doomed because they still depend on a plastic disc fewer and fewer people want.

But if the CD is dying, will the album follow?

It's popular to say so: I've made that case myself, and last week Mark Cuban stepped up with his take on the situation. (At the risk of spoiling the suspense, Mr. Cuban's blog post is titled "The Album Is Dead. . .")

But wait, the album fans among you are saying: Didn't you just note that sales of digital albums rose 53%? Sure seems like a heartbeat to me. Well, not so fast. According to Nielsen Soundscan, last year, 844.2 million digital tracks were sold, compared with just 50 million digital albums. That's 17 to 1. In 1994, by comparison, the industry sold 615 million albums and 99 million singles. Moreover, digital- album sales have consistently been more weighted to catalog and "deep catalog" items (generally speaking, releases more than 18 months old) than sales of physical CDs, and catalog and deep-catalog sales have shown stronger growth. While digital music does boost the "long tail" effect, I think those numbers are evidence that digital-album sales are being driven by consumers updating their music collections, which says more about music's past than its future. (And if I'm right, that's still more evidence that ripping CDs is too much fuss for many folks.)

Having declared the album dead, Mr. Cuban wonders why artists don't serialize the release of songs, creating a "season" for fans in which new music would appear every couple of weeks. (I immediately thought of They Might Be Giants' old Dial-A-Song service, and then of artists who've turned to more-frequent EP releases, such as Ryan Adams and Ben Folds.) It's easier, Mr. Cuban argues, to ask music fans for 99 cents each week than it is to ask them to pay $9.99 once for 10 songs.

I think he's onto something. To me, the key point isn't the idea of releasing a steady stream of music instead of an album a year at most -- that's an interesting discussion, but not a new one. Rather, it's asking what music fans will most readily pay for. Debates about serializing music tend to revolve around the artist's creative process, and devolve into arguments between song guys and album guys about the artistic merits of those forms. (Reader caveat: I'm very much a song guy.) But this debate may soon be beside the point: The ideal creative process isn't so ideal if it doesn't get you paid. If consumers won't pay for albums, it behooves artists to find another form.

The album's very name is an anachronism -- it dates back to 1930s books that held multiple 78s in sleeves, and so resembled photo albums. And its form has mutated over the years in reaction to new technologies: The album settled down for a while at around 45 minutes and two sides of a vinyl LP, then bulked up (often to bloated proportions) in the 1990s because of the longer running time afforded by CDs. Now, in the digital age, storage capacity no longer matters -- any limits on an album's length are arbitrary.

Album fans, take heart: Dispensing with the album as a consumer item doesn't necessarily mean tossing it aside as an art form. Do today's readers think less of Charles Dickens' novels because they first appeared as serials? Radiohead is an album-oriented band, but wouldn't its recent experiment with "In Rainbows" have generated as much or even more buzz if the songs had appeared over time? Would fans of "Sgt. Pepper's," "The Wall" or "American Idiot" think less of those albums if the first journey through their component songs had taken weeks or months?

The music industry has been criticized for being slow to change, but recent months have seen try some experiments, from DRM-free music to ad-supported songs on demand to Nokia's "Comes With Music" program. In an age of consumer impatience and shorter attention spans, more musicians should consider experiments of their own.

How do you buy digital music -- by album or track? Would you like serialized releases from your favorite artists? Share your thoughtswith me and other Online Journal readers, or email me. If you've got something to say via email but don't want your comments considered for publication, please make that clear.