Is the Album Format Going to the Dickens?

In all the chatter about how the music business is going to be in the future, it occurred to me something is being lost in this conversation.

The thought was that the music consumer has turned to cherry picking his music because the music companies continue to release long playing albums with few quality songs and a lot of substandard filler.

It seems, that in today's landscape, the ability for an artist to say enough on any subject to produce an album like Sgt. Pepper's, Tommy or Dark Side of the Moon doesn't seem likely. In just the last decade, society has reduced all its conversation on any subject to soundbites on video or messages of not even 140 words, but 140 characters.

It would be difficult for any artist to try to distill his thoughts and feelings on the topic of how mental illness and the pressure of creating art for the masses, reduced a person into someone different than the person he/she once knew into just three minutes.

Interestingly, that story, outlined over the 43 minutes and 10 songs of Dark Side of the Moon, was such an aural experience, that not only did the album sell well upon it's release, but has continued selling for, literally, decades. Dark Side of the Moon's combination of inspiration, musical talent and production expertise is singular in the history of recorded music. There are others that can be argued the equal DSOTM in importance but none exceeds the standard set by that effort.

Even on a secondary level, the long playing album that achieves extraordinary success in popularity, like Frampton Comes Alive, Thriller, Saturday Night Fever, or once again, Pink Floyd with The Wall, seems to be a format that can not be achieved anymore.

There are other albums, which we can all conger up in our mind's ears, that have not achieved anything near multi-platinum status. Yet, somehow, when played, are thought of by the listener as genius. Those albums also seem to be things of the past. It would seem, given the problems in the music business, that no one is reaching that level of excellence any more.

To say that would be too broad a brush to use on music's future. There will always be artists out there spilling their guts over something that causes them to write enough songs for a cohesive album. Songs that can be looked upon as the equal of any of the above music. If one didn't believe that, then music would not be the artistic outlet it has been for people since they began using musical expression.

The problem, it seems, is that even if there was a new Roger Waters or Woody Guthrie out there, somewhere, writing inspired masterpiece after masterpiece, how are they to be heard? How would the cohesive story of Tommy, the deaf dumb and blind kid, ever be told, listened to and discussed among fans and, importantly, supported, if albums are subjugated to the cannibalism of iTunes, Rhapsody or Spotify?

My big question is how would the album ever becomes the collective unifying source again? How would Dark Side ever become the icon it occupies now in today's fractured delivery models? How would it be heard by enough people?

In other words, how could an album like Dark Side of the Moon or Hotel California go viral?

Could the music listener of today's Twittering society have the patience to sit down and allow the message to be delivered over a forty minute span? And if not, then how will the artist be able to deliver a lifetime of thought and belief in a 140 character message or a three minute song?

Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in between. Charles Dickens is considered to be one of the most popular novelists in the history of the English language. Yet, initially, much of his work was serialized in newspapers. From Wikipedia:

"Much of (Dickens')

work first appeared in periodicals and magazines in serialized form, a popular way of publishing fiction at the time. Other writers would complete entire novels before serial publication commenced, but Dickens often wrote his in parts, in the order they were meant to appear. The practice lent his stories a particular rhythm, punctuated by one "cliffhanger" after another, to keep the public eager for the next installment."

Perhaps the future of the long playing album is in the literary past. With the, apparently, short attention span of the music listener, maybe what today's artist should strive for is creating songs that are released over a period of time. It would be a way to keep in front of the dedicated fan, and allow the new fan to jump into the parade at any juncture, and then, if interested, go back to catch up. Think of the interest that could be generated within the fan base waiting for the next installment.

An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it. Maybe the "serialized" LP's time has come.