All during the recording of the new DownTown Mystic CD I was reading about the death of the CD and the Album as an art form. I was in a recording studio, where time is money, wondering what I’m going to do with the music I’m recording once I finish. The engineer will burn me a CDr with whatever I’ve recorded each day to listen to in my car. I’ll come home and upload the cd to my computer so I can have digital files to play with. When I’m done with recording in the studio, I’ll have a dozen or so CDrs that have been created so that I can listen on my computer, my stereo system, my car stereo system and whatever other system I can check out to hear what my music actually sounds like when played on various sound systems.

At the end of all of it, I’ll wonder if it will make any difference to the average listener out there. Did I just waste my time and money, as well as years of experience on something that nobody is going to pay attention to? Do I want to stick my music on a piece of plastic anymore and release it?

One thing that I did notice when I thought about putting an album’s worth of music together was that I didn’t want to listen to more than 6 songs at 1 sitting. I didn’t seem to want to hear a full cd’s worth of music from any 1 artist, even if I was the artist! So putting together 10-12 songs was becoming harder to do for me than in the past. Certainly, the days of filling up a cd with 15 or 16 songs was long over.

The new approach being bandied about in the Blogosphere was to release singles at regular intervals. Why put out 10-12 songs in 1 shot when most people were only listening to 1 track at a time from various artists? By releasing singles, you would be able to get music out more frequently to fans over a period of months rather than them having to wait a year or two before you released a full album. And with attention spans becoming shorter and shorter, can an artist afford to wait 1-2 years not having their product out and expect to have fans stick around waiting for them? Some will and some won’t because there’s so much competition out there now from all over the world.

It made a lot of sense to me…especially with the digital format and downloading now becoming an accepted way to purchase and listen to music. I believe you have to “change with the changes”.  The Internet is the #1 way to be seen and heard today. With DownTown Mystic getting radio airplay in Europe, I only saw Radio being on the Internet because the only way for me to hear those stations playing me was by listening to them on the Internet! This is very cool and very new for anyone who is used to listening to a radio station by tuning in the dial of a radio. 🙂

The other thing about releasing singles that I liked was that it’s really an old school practice. Back to the birth of rock’n’roll, singles were the main way to get heard. Back then, an artist would sign a Singles Deal with a record company, not an Album Deal. An artist needed to have a few hit singles before they would get the chance to record an album. With DownTown Mystic being considered “retro” and having Digital Distribution with The Orchard, I really liked the idea of releasing some digital singles and working my way up to an album release.

But I am “old school” and I do like the album as an art form. Having grown up buying LPs on vinyl, I also like having the physical product in my hand, looking at the cover art and reading the credits and lyrics and whatever else is included. And because I grew up listening to 45s and LPs, I became interested in quality sounding recordings. Now we can argue about Vinyl vs CD in terms of which is better sounding, but 1 thing audiophiles can all agree on is that both are far superior to the MP3.

The Record Business became successful thanks to my age group—the Baby Boomers. And as it turns out, many in my age group who are on the radio side, still prefer listening to physical product as opposed to digital. When it came to making the decision whether to do a CD, it was a “no brainer” for me because I wanted to hear my music while holding and looking at my own CD and I wanted to create it for the people who also like doing that.

Now making an Album to put on cd was my challenge. I wanted my Album to have a “vibe” to it. Part of creating the “vibe” is the pacing of the songs and somehow putting them together in such a way as to tell a story. I do think that the CD had a good deal to do with the “death of the Album as an art form”. The vinyl LP has 2 sides, which means breaking up the songs to 5 or 6 a side. In the past, because of the format, great LPs would put emphasis on the opening and closing tracks to each side of the record.

I think that was definitely lost with CDs, where you listen to 10-12 songs in a row. With the LP, an artist had to have 3 or 4 songs that were standouts to lead off or close a side. But with attention spans getting shorter, an artist is confronted with having to put the best songs at the start of a CD because people might not get through to the end. Also, with the LP there’s the physical act of having to get up and flip the record over to listen to the other side. So just having to do that breaks up the flow of music, which can be good or bad, depending on the listener.

So how do I feel about the death of the CD and Album as an art form? As I stated earlier, I’m “old school” and like having my music on a physical format. As long as there are people like me, I’ll continue to make CDs. As for the album as an art form, I think the jury is still out on that. Like anything else, an art form is only as good as the artists who use it and take pride in it. 🙂

Lost & Found