Scene from the "A Dying God Coming Into Human Flesh" video, Celtic Frost Just had a look at today's Wall Street Journal and read a story on Apple's iTunes. To cut a long story short, Apple is changing its "song selling" strategy to one of three-tiered pricing: Instead of the current 99 cents, songs will cost 69 cents, 99 cents or $1.29.
So, who is going to decide on how much a song is worth? The answer is the "invisible hand" of the so-called "free market," of course. Quoting WSJ: "... people familiar with the matter said the most sought-after-songs, which generate most of the sales on the service, will likely cost $1.29."
Now, iTunes, though still alien to many metalheads that like to feel and touch their music, is not a joke. It has sold 6 billion songs since 2003. All in all, digital music retailers in the US sold more than 1 billion songs last year alone.
The real question here is, are users downloading albums or songs? As the "product" is presented as a song, it is a safe bet to assume that individual "songs" are being downloaded and listened, who would want to download those "fillers" instead of purchasing an extra single from whatever band?
Thus, atomization, the trademark of capitalist mass culture, has started working its way into albums themselves. (Another disturbing sign would be that cute "Shuffle" button at your WinAmp, or that ominous iPod Shuffle device.) Cultural atomization presents "standardized, formulaic and repetitive" products into the "market," destroying any traces of authenticity or originality. That is only natural, because the driving force behind this "culture" is not the creation of culture, but the creation of "marketable" culture.
Having done a small Googling on the issue, I am pleased to see there are others out there who are worried. One asks: "Does the 'concept album' (aka The Who’s Tommy and Quadrophenia; Pink Floyd’s The Wall, etc.) ever stand a chance of resurfacing? Will more artists move to 'unit marketing' where they push the smallest possible pieces of content into a marketplace that mixes, matches, and rearranges (even more so that today)?" Another one gazes to a key point: "... there is a perceived notion that music criticism is no longer necessary." And Chuck Klosterman is really, really pessimistic: "… Chinese Democracy is (pretty much) the last Old Media album we’ll ever contemplate in this context - it’s the last album that will be marketed as a collection of autonomous-but-connected songs, the last album that will be absorbed as a static manifestation of who the band supposedly is, and the last album that will matter more as a physical object than as an Internet sound file."
The moral of the story comes from a blogger at The Independent:
"Our listening habits have effectively become one long, self-created compilation album. Whereas in the past you might listen to an album and establish which are your favourite tracks, your less favourite ones might well become favourites later on, because you'd listen to the album as a unit. No longer; we can easily discard the tracks we don't want - and, indeed, with iTunes or illegal downloads, never have to buy them in the first place. So the tracks we end up liking are informed by the judgement of others."
Having said all these, metal is still far away from the threat and if any genre is to protect its integrity, that would be metal. And for two reasons: First, the "marketability" is relatively low and second, its listeners are much better armed, either by instinct or by knowledge or by both, against the "invisible hand."
Still, something has to be done against the atomization, the fragmentation of music, through dismantling the concept of album itself. I would say that first the issue and the severity of it should be discussed and assessed. I hope such a platform to debate this mass culture of bastardization will be formed, by musicians in the first place, as the threat gets more visible.
Until then, we listeners should at least "ban" that shuffle button and listen our music the way it is meant to be listened. I, for one, will start with the mighty Dreamweaver!
Until then, we listeners should at least "ban" that shuffle button and listen our music the way it is meant to be listened. I, for one, will start with the mighty Dreamweaver!
