The album is dead. Long live the album

Has the rise of digital really killed off the 'album' or do we need to separate our sadness at the loss of a medium from our frustration at a lack of innovation?

There's been a tumult of recent commentary revolving around (no doubt at 33⅓ rpm) the potential decline of what was once the 'LP' and now is the 'album'. The BBC has been the main culprit with admittedly excellent documentaries such as "The Golden Age of the Album" and "The Great Album Showdown" all indulging in a warm and fuzzy nostalgia for a time when vinyl ruled the world.

The love of vinyl is no bad thing, all that's associated with the physical means of 'putting on a record' makes sense to me despite my growing up in a predominantly post-LP era. The tangible nature of the format, the opportunities to indulge in extensive artwork and the obvious emotional investment required in taking time to care for the object itself are all facets of the black disc's appeal I can readily recognise.

Unfortunately, the underlining implication in all this retrospective affection is an erroneous assumption that the artistic validity of the album format itself (i.e. a collection of songs over approximately 45 mins) died along with the drop in vinyl production at the turn of the 1980's.

This patently isn't true; the subtext exemplar of an albeit understandable, rose-tinted fondness for the past, a rejection of the musical validity of the new, easily afforded by the distinguishable 'line in the sand' that is the 'death' of a format. It's too convenient to associate this with the perceived end of an art form, a perception which is, no doubt, subjugation for a notional tide mark representing the moment a glorious youth was lost forever.

Ironically, those who never experienced the proliferation of the 12 inch such as I - more familiar with the compact disc than anything - are now, themselves, superseded by a generation who may never experience a physical format of any kind.

It's tempting for those with vast CD collections to take a similar approach to the contemporary rise of digital music.

When we remember the unfettered excitement of a midnight album release (and the associated queues around the block they created) and then see the 'pilfering' of individual tracks from across the iTunes store filling out 'On-the-go' playlists with greatest hits, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine ourselves, at fifty something, plastered, pot-bellied and pie-eyed, across our own BBC Four programme, falling into the self-same traps as our fore-bearers.

Surely, one glance at any greatest album list published in the past 30 years would be enough to assuage any doubts about the album's continuing cultural significance.

Radiohead's paranoic distillation of millennial meltdown in 'OK Computer', The Strokes cathartic destruction of bloated, arse-end Britpop in 'Is This It?' and the romantic never world of hedonistic possibility The Libertines brought to 'Up The Bracket'; just three albums that, in their own, very different ways, successfully encapsulated the impact, appeal and artistic achievement of the best 'LP's of yore.

Radiohead, of course, were responsible for a defining moment in the digital music age, releasing the elegiac 'In Rainbows' as a download at the apparent drop of a hat.

This year, too, has already seen David Bowie unexpectedly release his first single in 10 years without anyone realising he was going to do so and My Bloody Valentine causing a twitter storm with the follow up to 'Loveless' released via their website.

The ease with which established artists can now make their work available is something to be cherished (even if it is questionable whether up and coming acts benefit from such a phenomenon - see Arctic Monkeys for a potential exception to the rule).

However, all examples appear to nod towards an as yet unseen potential for artistic expression and innovation afforded by the digital format. Without the restrictions of having to print artwork, surely the possibilities and scope are endless?

Rather than just an album cover and sleeve notes, why not a separate image for each track? Digital booklets are already a done thing but it feels like the tip of the iceberg and it doesn't just stop with artwork.

Perhaps - just as when LP's were first used solely for movie soundtracks, before artists like Dylan realised their full potential to be something much more - we too are in the fledgling era of today's digital format, waiting for somebody to utilise its possibilities, to create something that will in itself generate another paradigm shift in the development of the album, one as radical as that the LP catalysed some 60 years prior.

The only question is when and who?

We're waiting...

Choice opinion

A recent study by royalties body PRS has found that the increased distribution of music by file sharing sites has only helped to make the most popular acts more popular!

'File-sharing only makes big acts bigger, study shows'
'Pirated pop keeps stars popular'

This wasn't how it was supposed to be was it?! This was supposed to be the revolution that all music lovers had been waiting for. It most certainly wasn't intended to make Coldplay more popular than...oh I don't know, oxygen?!

Sites like 'MySpace' allowed such acts as Lilly Allen and the Arctic Monkeys to amass large fan bases with no more resource than a single laptop and good old fashioned word of mouth.

"Hurrah" we cried as we well and truly stuck one to the record labels. The same labels of course, who would immediately snap up these acts, now assured of their potential for shifting units.

Despite this cynicism though and the fact 'Napster' may have been closed down along with the dubious 'Pirate Bay' more recently, these relatively new developments have at least forced the record companies to find alternate ways of distributing music. This has indirectly given rise to excellent sites such as 'Last FM' and 'Spotify' where streamed music can be heard for free!

The Libertines were perhaps the first to harness the web in this way, giving access to unreleased tracks via the Internet for free and encouraging the distribution of demos and bootlegs with veritable glee.

It was Radiohead though who took this one step further, allowing fans to pay as much or as little as they liked for album 'In Rainbows', thus bypassing a record company altogether and hosting the music files for download on an independent website.

There are problems with this kind of 'giveaway' however. Radiohead were in the fortunate position of being an established act, having written some of the most heralded albums of our age and can more than afford to make such artistic statements.

Up and coming artists, struggling hard to establish themselves above the general dirge of this or that scene, don't have the luxury of releasing music for free. They need all the money they can get, often, no doubt, working numerous jobs to make ends meet and keep the bandwagon rolling.

There's a comparable situation in the world of scholarly publishing as it happens; one I'm party to in my work on technical journals. Academics and researchers in Universities and at Learned Institutions worldwide are championing 'open access' publishing whereby their research papers are made accessible freely to the scientific community rather than through the subscription seeking journal titles as was the past norm.

Academics argue, understandably, that scientific research shouldn't be restricted by these models, that making it freely accessible encourages discussion, visibility and further research.

Fair enough, you may think, an admirable cause. Consider however, the smaller, independent publishers (such as my employer the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science & Technology) not blessed with the funding of these higher education institutions. How can they maintain their business whilst supplying access to journal titles for free?

One of the more favoured models for open access is to charge the author for publishing their material, thus subsidising the free access to the paper. Again this may seem reasonable, but what of authors in developing countries, who may not be able to afford publishing costs enforced by developed world publishing groups, or the independent researcher not supported by an academic faculty and forced to fund themselves?

Would we want to exclude this type of author and restrict the amount of 'grey' literature produced in niche areas of study? Yes, we may have free access to the 'stars' of academia but we dilute diversity and restrict opportunity. Amongst other things, the most popular authors, will inevitably get more popular.

Is this what's happening in the music world? With music files shared freely and streaming services available widely, we now have access to more and more music than ever before, diversity therefore isn't being compromised. This new world certainly allows the 'grey' music on the fringes of our public conscience to find a place but clearly this isn't making much of a difference to its sales?

In the current climate, we no longer rely on traditional barometers such as 'Top of the Pops' or even a guru figure like John Peel. As a consequence there's no longer a filter in place to sort the wheat from the chaff. We have to suffer more and more utter pap in the process. I wonder, as a result, whether this actually affords us too much choice. The majority overloaded, simply opt out, preferring to stick with old stalwarts.

In 'All is Vanity, from the recently released Manic Street Preachers album 'Journal for Plague Lovers', James Dean Bradfield sings, "I would prefer no choice. One bread, one milk, one food." Nicky Wire speaking in a recent NME interview explains...

"And I mean, that still resonates with us so deeply today. The idea that there's just so much choice now, that when we apply that to music, people think it's great that there's so much music, and that's so obviously not the case because so much of it is utter drivel. And you know, too much choice in music has led to mediocrity. And I think it's that kind of idea that Richey [lyricist] liked experts. He liked people who he thought were thoroughly researched and immersed in each particular subject. And we're still like that now."

So there you have it. Whether we like it or not, we need the institutionalised means of accessing our music, our research literature, our politics even. Yes, there's a balance to strike, but ironically and subconsciously, we'd all like to be told what we think. If we didn't, opinion columnists, reviewers and art critics would be out of a job and where would that leave us?

Quite possibly we'd have to suffer endless repeats of U2 'staples' festering across the air waves, all because we wouldn't know where to start nor finish; we'd all accept defeat; worse still, we'd accept the general perception that U2 are indeed 'the greatest ever band'. Let us hope we never see the day.