The End of the Music Album and David Bowie Lyrics

For sev­eral decades, there was a trend in pop­u­lar music named the “con­cept album.” Sadly, how­ever, the trend seems to be dying:

For decades, the music indus­try has been look­ing to the album charts to estab­lish what made a hit. In the past 10 years, though, album sales have plum­meted, sales of sin­gles have surged and new sources of rev­enue have emerged — like fees for music streamed online and ring­tone pur­chases — that are chang­ing the def­i­n­i­tion of a hot artist.

Still, much of the indus­try relies on the Bill­board 200, the long­time album sales chart, as the pri­mary mea­sure and talk­ing point about an artist’s mon­ey­mak­ing prowess…

BigCham­pagne, a media mea­sure­ment firm in Cal­i­for­nia, believes there is an open­ing for a new chart that bet­ter cap­tures an artist’s pop­u­lar­ity and com­mer­cial suc­cess. Last month, the com­pany intro­duced a ser­vice, which it is call­ing the Ulti­mate Chart, that ranks artists based on the num­ber of albums sold, sin­gles sold, songs streamed online and other fac­tors. The ser­vice also ranks sales of albums and sin­gles, though they diverge lit­tle from Billboard’s charts.

On the most recent Ulti­mate Chart, Mr. Cruz is the No. 2 artist. Lil Wayne ranks as the fourth most pop­u­lar artist, while his most recent album, “Rebirth,” is on the Bill­board album chart at No. 89.

Back in the prover­bial day, a record, eight-track, cas­sette tape, or com­pact disc was not always just a col­lec­tion of ran­dom songs. (Though for the pop artists of any time, it usu­ally was and is.) The devices were often col­lec­tive pieces of art that com­mu­ni­cated a com­mon theme or story through lyrics, music, mean­ings, sto­ry­telling, and artwork.

For my younger read­ers, here are a few examples:

• “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Star­dust and the Spi­ders from Mars” by David Bowie
• “Tommy” by the Who
• Any of the first six albums by the Moody Blues
• “The Wall” by Pink Floyd
• “Par­adise The­ater” by Styx

Even though I have been out of touch with pop music specif­i­cally since the early 1990s and Amer­i­can music gen­er­ally since I moved to Israel in 2008, I still do not know or remem­ber any­thing com­pa­ra­ble in the last twenty years or so.

Argu­ing about music is gen­er­ally point­less since art is inher­ently sub­jec­tive, but I always stick my dig­i­tal guns. Any­one can play three chords on a gui­tar, write a cliched song about love and pain, and use auto­tune to per­fect his or her vocals. But the abil­ity to cre­ate to com­plex, multi-layered piece of artis­tic and musi­cal pro­duc­tion is what dif­fer­en­ti­ates singers and pop stars from song­writ­ers and musi­cians.

After all, most of the songs per­formed by pop stars and star­lets are writ­ten by some­one else at the music com­pany. I would be sur­prised if more than a few even know what meter means in poetry. I have only seen a few episodes of “Amer­i­can Idol” in Israel and Amer­ica, but I had always wished that the judges would some­how gauge musi­cal abil­ity in addi­tion to singing abil­ity and stage pres­ence. But that is not what sells the most records since the music industry’s pri­mary demo­graphic is teenage girls. (This is one rea­son why MTV changed its mar­ket­ing for the worse over the years.)

I fear that the rise of the sin­gle, Inter­net tech­nol­ogy, and the over­all trend towards indi­vid­u­al­ized, seg­mented mar­ket­ing will only make mat­ters worse.

When I was a young teenager, my step­fa­ther intro­duced me to clas­sic rock — and one of the first albums I dis­cov­ered was the afore­men­tioned one by David Bowie. I had already known the two most-popular sin­gles, “Ziggy Star­dust” and “Suf­fragette City,” from the local classic-rock radio sta­tion and told him that I was excited to have my own copies of the song. Here is the latter:

“Those are not even one of the best songs on the album,” he said with a wink.

And my step­fa­ther was cor­rect. The best song is “Five Years” — the first on the album that pro­ceeds to intro­duce the story and theme. If some­one today would find the album on iTunes, he would likely never hear the song because he would only down­load the single.

Any good album con­tains price­less nuggets that rarely receive air time — and the best art is not always what sells. On this Bowie album, I also rec­om­mend “Star­man” and “Rock and Roll Sui­cide” — the lat­ter is the last song on the album. Still, the entire pro­duc­tion is entic­ing as a whole.

But when music com­pa­nies are always push­ing to have the “next, big sin­gle” on YouTube and the iTunes, the over­all qual­ity of the art will decline.

Tags: music ring­tones, music on hold, music phone, music licens­ing, wire­less music sys­tem, music pro­duc­tion schools, stock music, music degree, music rights, online music degree