The first article (subscription required) is about this all-girl R&B group named Candy Hill (amusingly misprinted in the original article as Cherry Hill), which Universal/Republic signed to record two singles instead of a full album. This coming on the heels of news that people are buying singles over albums by a margin of 19 to 1.
The second is an op-ed column written by the guys who owned NYCD, the (now defunct) music store on Manhattan's Upper West Side. They write:
The sad thing is that CDs and downloads could have coexisted peacefully and profitably. The current state of affairs is largely the result of shortsightedness and boneheadedness by the major record labels and the Recording Industry Association of America, who managed to achieve the opposite of everything they wanted in trying to keep the music business prospering. The association is like a gardener who tried to rid his lawn of weeds and wound up killing the trees instead.
Funny how the music industry is now hyping the single as the wave of the future after embarking on a decade-and-a-half-long campaign of suing 12-year-old girls to eliminate it.
I'm not sure that all of this is going to completely kill the album, though. If anything, I think we'll just see even more cookie-cutter, flash-in-the-pan artists who will give VH1 a whole new countdown of one-hit wonders. Who needs artistic vision when your fan base consists of MTV spring breakers with the attention spans of a grapefruit, anyway?
I think fans of real artists (you know, the kind that don't rely on computer algorithms to write their tracks) will continue to demand full-length albums. I mean, part of the labels' problem is not that people won't buy albums, it's that people won't buy crappy albums. I remember reading somewhere that Dark Side of the Moon still sells around 10,000 copies per week. Neon Bible by Arcade Fire is still at the top of the charts, and that's without the benefit of a major label marketing machine to back them up.
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