LA CRISIS DEL ROCK

Interesante artículo aparecido en claasicrockmagazine.com, con apetitotas intervenciones, sobre la crisis del rock y la muerte de EL ALBUM como concepto:

http://www.classicrockmagazine.com/features/rock-in-crisis-is-the-album-era-over/

Newspapers, magazines and even rock stars such as The Cult’s Ian Astbury have declared the album to be dead. But is the long-player actually as doomed as it appears?

 

Words: Chris Roberts

“The album is dying in front of our very eyes… We’ve turned into a nation of grazers. And the artist’s job is to constantly be at the smörgåsbord. Not to deliver one big meal that is picked at and thrown away, but to constantly provide tantalising bites to the public… It’s not only classic rock acts who have stopped putting out albums, eventually no one will do it. It won’t be soon, because artists think making albums is part of their DNA, going into the studio and making a 10-track statement. But that’s like saying typewriters have to be an office fixture. And you can’t post online unless you write in multiple paragraphs. And texting must be abandoned because it’s not in-depth enough” – Bob Lefsetz, Variety

Allow me a brief reminiscence. In September 1975, during the golden age of the album, I saved up £2.99 in pocket money and excitedly went to buy Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here on the day of its release. Discovering that Electrip Records (now defunct: such foreshadowing!) was charging £3.50, I was, to use a term not then invented, gutted. Of course, as the album age progressed, the price of albums was to soar to a fiver and then a tenner, where it settled for years.

The 21st century has sent the skittles flying; a paradigm shift has occurred, offering many benefits and many disturbances. Most new albums can now be downloaded for a fiver or so, and if you don’t want all of it you can usually cherry-pick your favourite tracks for 99p or less each. It’s the new – dread phrase – business model. If only the manager of Electrip Records had let me buy three quarters of Wish You Were Here, I wouldn’t have trudged home disconsolate and been excluded from the hot topic of discussion in the schoolyard the next Monday.

Four decades on, ‘the death of the album’ is the hot topic of discussion in the playground of media discourse. Free MP3s, file-sharing, tracks debuted on Soundcloud, pledging, Spotify – all are eating away at the album as we used to know it.

“There will be no new album. I don’t think we’ll ever see a Cult album. Albums are dead. The format is dead. iTunes destroyed albums. The whole idea of an album. Albums were established in the 70s and 80s and into the 90s, but they’ve been dead for a long time. Nobody buys albums. It’s been proven. It’s an arcane format, as much as the 78rpm record or writing sheet music for an orchestra” – Ian Astbury, The Cult 

It was 1948 when Columbia Records introduced the 33rpm long-player, which, allowing for a few modifications (such as stereo), ruled the roost until CDs swanned in in 1982. From the early 60s to the mid-2000s is now referred to as ‘the album era’, in which artists could explore their vision, expanding their vocabulary. That’s actually a thing, ‘the album era’: an official historic term, deemed to be waning.

Albums gave you a continuous, immersive musical experience; they weren’t just a delivery system, but a new medium. “The sequencing of an album is a very important subtext in the whole chapter of rock music,” says Peter Hammill, part-time of Van der Graaf Generator. “It’s always been absolutely crucial. For me it has to have a flow, a strange journey going on through the course of it.”

Once, you held music, carried it, stroked it lovingly. Now it shoots instantaneously down a wire. Convenient, sure. But the tactile treasure-hunt element, the thrill of the chase, is gone. As is the seductive artwork. Record shops struggle to stay afloat. In the first decade of this century, album sales dropped by 50 per cent while sales of individual digital tracks raced from zero to 1.2 billion. A compassionate boxing referee might have stopped the bout.

In 2014, with time-honoured music-biz structures crumbling like cliff-side residences in a tsunami, the album as a format is under threat, flailing to survive. What is its fate/future? It seems extraordinary and saddening to most of us of a certain age that this beloved institution is fading, that we’re losing our religion.

But the stats suggest so. The top-selling album of last year – One Direction’s Midnight Memories, rock fans – scraped past 700,000 sales. Compare that to the previous year’s Emeli Sande (1.4m) and 2011’s Adele (a whopping 3.9m) and you can see how sharp the fall is. Half of 2013’s Top 10 were released in 2012, and it didn’t include the albums we mostly talked about, like Bowie’s The Next Day. Rock was represented, but only if you categorise Arctic Monkeys and, er, Jake Bugg as rock. Black Sabbath’s comeback, 13, stormed to Number One in its week of release but didn’t – more horrible jargon – ‘sustain’.

“To understand the shift to a market dominated by singles and streaming, the industry has introduced a new measure, TEA (track equivalent albums) which counts 10 track sales as one album. If the TEA measure is used, [Miley Cyrus’s] Bangerz, which only sold 245,000 traditional copies in its first week, rises to 750,000 sales” – The Guardian, November 2013 

And yet people will pay for a pricy collector’s item, an artfully boxed deluxe or anniversary remaster-repackage with bonus add-ons by a leading name: a Pink Floyd or Radiohead. This is music as memorabilia, nostalgia, a desire to revisit lost youth. Nothing criminal about that, but no one can claim it’s a way forward.

But! It’s not all doom and gloom. In the UK last year, after five years of decline, sales of albums and singles fell by just 0.5% to £1.04 billion. Digital album sales rose 6.8% to £233m. “As digital music moves into the streaming era,” BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor told The Guardian, “the prospects for future growth in the UK music market look strong.” This supposes we’ve embraced the digital world; CD sales fell another 12.8%.

“For the sixth straight year, more vinyl albums were sold than in any other year since SoundScan launched in 1991. In 2013, 6.1 million vinyl LPs were sold – up 33% compared to 2012’s haul of 4.55 million. 64% of all vinyl albums sold in 2012 were purchased at an independent music store (three percent less than compared to indie stores’ share in 2012). Notably – and not surprisingly – 75% of all vinyl albums sold in 2013 were rock albums” - Billboard, January 2014

As for the album per se, even combined sales of digital and physical albums fell 3.6% (to £772M). We’ll stop with the stats now, after mentioning a glimmer of light (or a quaint sidebar, depending on your view): the vinyl mini-revival held up well, with 780,000 vinyl albums sold, double the previous year’s figure. Vinyl’s va-va-voom makes for a nice dog-saves-man story at the end of the news, but it’s hard to deny that the future looks digital.

Hope springs eternal. Romance may not be dead. There might be enough love for the album format to defy logistics. Artists rush to its defence. “Will the album survive?” says Tony Visconti, famed producer of Bowie and so many classic albums. “Who is that up to – the industry, or the artists? The camera didn’t put the painter out of business. The album is surviving. It will always be an option.”

Steven Wilson, taking a breath from his prolific career, concurs. “Saying the album will disappear is like saying that from now on novelists will only write short stories, or film-makers will only make short films or pop videos. There is something about the long form and the idea of a gradually unfolding musical experience that allows for greater juxtapositions of dynamics, mood and emotion, sometimes simply in the way that the songs are sequenced. In the case of progressive/art rock, the idea of taking the listener on a musical journey over the course of 45 minutes or so has always been the primary form of creative expression, but many other great pop and rock albums also have that sense of ‘architecture’ that you find in a beautifully crafted film or novel. While the album might become less dominant as a format, I believe it will prevail as an artistic choice for both those making music and those that listen to it.”

Time was when we, the listeners, couldn’t imagine not wanting to hear the artist’s full tale; the whole film, not just a trailer. Attitudes are changing, but affection for the album is ingrained in many of us. From Abbey Road and Electric Ladyland through Diamond Dogs and Tubular Bells to Marquee Moon and OK Computer, we fell for the whole trip, not just a few stations. Can the album – as a narrative, immersive, sensory experience – keep its head above the tide of digitalism?

Simon Raymonde is both artist (as an ex-Cocteau Twin, now with Snowbird) and industry sage, as head of the Bella Union label (home to success stories like John Grant and Fleet Foxes). “The album isn’t going away anytime soon,” he says. “Change is something the music business is always assessing. And now, as the music bloggers’ demand for new content – hourly rather than daily – increases, it can push us all into a world we’re not sure we want to be in. The ‘track world’ we are apparently moving towards is limp. The model doesn’t work yet… The album format has never been stronger, because bands are writing in a way similar to how directors make films. They want to tell a story, to create a multitude of feelings and expressions across the album that cannot be portrayed in a singular track. Thus it has always been.

“One lucrative song, usually one used in a commercial, will provide a good income. But I haven’t met an artist yet who hasn’t wanted to make an album. Even the Flaming Lips, 30 years into their career, after understandably feeling a little ‘tired’ of the album/tour/album/tour cycle, broke away for a year or so and just put up a load of tracks online and had fun again. But a year later the frivolity wore off, and that urge to create a body of work, the desire to develop ideas and sounds across one hour of vinyl, returned. I don’t feel it will go away easily. To hand a band a freshly-pressed copy of vinyl of their new LP is something I’ll never tire of doing. If I send them a WAV of a track that we want to post online, there is no palpable joy. Talking of the Flaming Lips, their delight at our pressing of The Terror album was palpable. When they came over to play The Roundhouse this year, they were visibly cheered at seeing and holding it.”

The album still says: see me, feel me. We’ll still climb the mountain to get the story. Have we gone all the way from Speak To Me to Eclipse? Not yet.
Taken from the new issue of Classic Rock, onsale now in all good newsagents in the UK. Buy the print edition direct from www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk. The digital edition is available from http://goo.gl/z4Yhu (in the UK) or here http://goo.gl/YUnR9 (for the US).