[Rataxes]

About the single vs album thing. It's true that quite a few artists and bands create albums meant as one entity, and indeed that many music fans listen to albums as such. But individual songs are also meant to be separate pieces of art. A better allegory than trailer-movie is episode-series. While some albums are simply built as a series of movies - an album full of good songs that stand on their own as artistic achievements, some are also built as series chopped up in episodes. The individual episodes are supposed to be at least watchable on their own, but the bigger picture can only be seen if you put all episodes together.

Most people don't care about the bigger picture though. Rarely do I hear people talk about more than great songs. It's becoming more and more common to grade albums on a song-by-song basis, and when people discuss the latest album, they usually do it song-by-song as well, instead of discussing the general album flow or feel. Now this is still music fantasts I'm talking about. Regular people care even less about the bigger picture and only buy albums in hope that they will find songs they like as much as the single they heard on the radio.

Artists ultimately don't care more about the bigger picture than the individual songs either, or how many live concerts have you experienced where whole albums were played in their entity? Individual songs gets picked out there and mixed, because in the end, what the fans care about are the songs, and not the albums.

The public interest on the whole is leaning a lot more towards the individual songs than the albums. People do download whole albums, but only because they can, and hope to find more of the same stuff they liked when they heard a song, not because they're looking for an album experience.

[ 04-12-2003, 06:50 PM: Message edited by: Rataxes ]