Singles vs. Albums

The music industry is going through some growing pains right now. And by music industry I'm referring to the record companies. Nobody's buying albums (CDs) anymore. When was the last time you bought a CD? Was your last music purchase a digital download? If your answer is that your last music purchase was a vinyl LP then this post is not for you and you can get back to your nap. ;)

I read an article the other day predicting that CD sales will cease entirely by 2012. That's the next presidential election. What's going on here??? What's the draw to digital downloads vs. having that piece of plastic (or vinyl) in your hands? The convenience? Sure, it's fast and easy to get your music now. I'm into instant gratification as much as the next guy, but let's get real.

Not so long ago when you heard a song on the radio that you liked you could buy just that song! Those were delivered on 45's - small vinyl records. For you kids, they were called 45's because they spun at 45 revolutions-per-minute (count 'em!). Well, technically you were getting two songs. There was an A-side and a B-side, but no one really cared about the B-side.

Later on people got in the habit of buying full-length albums, typically 10-12 songs. An album was an experience. It was a cohesive piece of work. It was the equivalent of watching a movie. You didn't go to the movies just to watch your favorite scene - it was a part of a whole. It was about the entire experience.

As the quality of music declined those one-hit-wonder bands put out albums that contained, for the most part, a lot of filler. Once CDs became the norm, 45s slowly disappeared. They tried CD-singles, which were really 4 or 5 songs, but it was still filler. I think this is where the idea of buying singles again became popular because you could buy only the good songs and not feel like you wasted your hard-earned money on some really bad songs.

With digital download web sites such as iTunes you can easily locate and buy as many songs from an artist's album as you'd like. So... after my long-winded introduction it brings me to my original point: singles or albums? Should artists continue to release albums or just a stream of singles as soon as they are made available? I'd love to hear your opinion.

As an independent artist the only way I can get my songs on iTunes is to have an album, that is, a CD for sale. Through my relationship with CD Baby I can have my entire CD available as down loadable mp3's on iTunes and many other digital download sites. When I went about putting together my CD it was created as the result of where I was emotionally during that period of songwriting. My life was going through many changes and I was falling in love again. So many of my songs are filled with a common theme. A comment I received from one of my peers (a musician) was that it actually sounded like "an album", meaning it sounded like it was meant to go together as opposed to just a bunch of disparate-sounding songs. Another colleague commented that there was so much love and positive affirmations coming from my words. I was pleased that they and other listeners responded so positively. I felt good about the end result and that Tallulah Lake is a whole and not just 14 songs.

I respect the idea of people choosing to buy only individual songs from Tallulah Lake, but I wish they would listen to the album as a whole. To my surprise, my biggest selling song from the album is "Leanne". I guess there must be a lot of gals out there named Leanne and there just aren't many other songs containing that name.