Design and usability rants and raves from Vancouver and around.
Now with added Social Media!
Now with added Social Media!
Pink Floyd just won a ruling to prevent their music being sold as individual tracks online. This is essentially the same reason The Beatles don’t appear on iTunes either.
I’m one of the fifty-nine billion people who own Dark Side of The Moon, and I could not tell you the name of any of the tracks other than Money (and that’s just a wild guess). As far as I’m concerned the album is one piece of work, and I think that’s their point too. It’s not about money (the stuff, not the song, although there are large sums involved).
Very few artists pulled the album-as-story approach off with the same mastery of the format, and this is where the problem arises.
The vast majority of the output of the music industry is total shit, and many albums are excuses to charge ten times as much for the single people actually like by having a different cover and some other songs that sound a bit like it. Digital downloading here benefits the customer who can buy the tracks they like and avoid the crap filler, and artists don’t really have to embarrass themselves by churning out their audio turds. (They still do, of course.)
The whole idea of “albums” was borne of a design limitation - vinyl.
Pink Floyd bothered to take the time to master the format to tell their stories in full. Most people couldn’t, wouldn’t or just didn’t, but whatever - now this limitation doesn’t exist. The whole story is lost on Shuffle and by the intentions of a self-proclaimed Genius.
I expect there’s not much to be done at this stage, except a few creative last-stands and perhaps a few expensive lawsuit gestures.
Shuffle
What I look forward to are the musicians pioneering the bite-size format of the new digital space - fuck the album - how about a collection of 50 lego-brick tracks that can all work in any way, joining up or even designed to mix, mash, overlay or extend works from other artists.
Rhizome album, anyone?
Certainly, copyright is on its last legs when questionably-talented artists like Girl Talk seem free to rape the cultural archives for a good knees-up, but he’s still releasing albums.
So who’s going to work as hard, with the talent of Pink Floyd or Lennon/McCartney, and move us with great musical stories in the digital download age?
Or are we doomed to forever download microformat disposable pod-shit?
Any recommendations?
