Artists Try Making us Listen to Albums

Today, the Wall Street Journal has an article about older artists performing entire albums worth of material in track order at their concerts. Cheap Trick even went so far as to reproduce Robin Zander's exact comments between songs that was captured on the "At Budokan" album, a Cheap Trick classic. Part of the idea is to counter the iPod effect of purchasing individual tracks and shuffle playing them.

I love music, as you can probably tell from the few posts on this blog, and I don't get out to see my favorite artists live as much as I would like. Most recently, I went to see The Fray in concert in Dallas. While I enjoyed the concert, it was probably the first time in a long time that I went to a concert by a band who only had one album's worth of recognized material. My comment at the time, which is relevant here, is that what I enjoyed about a concert was seeing a talented artist take risks, play different material, cover other people's songs -- in other words, give me something I can't get by just listening to their album. Since the Beatles won't be reuniting to play "Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band" and I abhor the BeeGees, I don't see that there's an album that I want to see recreated on stage.

Reading further about the AC/DC deal with Verizon, it appears that they will only be offering entire albums, not individual tracks. They too seem "hung up" on preserving the 12-14 track album format.

To all this I say, "get over it!". Music, at its best, is all about experimentation, defying conventions, breaking the rules, and covering new ground. Forcing us to remain captive to the album format, which was a contrived creation to get us to buy albums in most cases to begin with, is counter to what good music is all about. If you want us to listen to extended passages that's one thing, but forcing me to buy or listen to the filler that you (or your producer) came up with in the studio so you could produce an entire CD, is what we as listeners are rejecting. It's time to come up with the next big thing, not rest on the past. My 2 cents. YMMV.



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