Death of the Album… Again
A recent article in the Toronto Globe and Mail was just the latest reappearance of some variation of the question, "Is the album dead?" Guy Dixon's essay created a buzz among musicians and their chat rooms.

Thirty years ago, Dixon writes, was the "apex of the concept-album era," during which "it was assumed that albums were made for art, coming after years of pivotal releases from the Beatle's 'Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band' to Marvin Gaye's 'What's Going On' to Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon,' to say nothing of predecessors such as Mile Davis's definitive exercise in modal jazz 'Kind of Blue' and John Coltrane's meditative 'Love Supreme.'"

Times change. The introduction of the longer-playing CD gave artists the opportunity to create longer works, but also to carelessly load the format with disconnected, incongruous filler.

Now in the age of digital downloads and iPods, how do artists - and their audiences - think about music? As songs? Or coherent collections of songs that mean something extra, a whole greater than the sum of the parts?

Dixon writes that "it seems impossible to imagine people thinking of their record collections as mere data waiting to be transferred onto their computer hard drives." At the same time, he points out that "when listing its choice for the number one album of the 1990s, influential music web site PitchForkMedia.com led by saying, 'The end of the nineties will be seen as the end of the album. The rise of MP3 technology and file downloading returned pop music consumption to [a] collective pre-Beatles mindset, where songs are judged as singles.' This was meant as praise for Radiohead's OK Computer, as if describing that record as the passing of an era."

Read the Globe and Mail essay, or a related article, "Death of the Album," in the Christian Science Monitor (Nov. 14, 2003 )

Read "Downloading Squeezes Art out of Album" from USA Today