music, albums, and metacontext.
I generally prefer a great EP to a great album. Mostly because 5-6 songs is perfect to make sure I get through it in one sitting.
As music has shifted from a separate experience, to an additive experience, albums are less likely to get listened to in one sitting. This is something that artists have flipped out over - and it makes sense; iTunes singles make the individual song the work of art, not the album. It removes metacontext. Metacontext is, in online terms, value.
Preserving metacontext is something that could be addressed by the idea floated by Jakob Lodwick, selling albums as an iPhone app.
Alternately, EPs could be sold in a one track format, with chapters (the way you can put chapter breaks in podcasts). I think this would be unwieldy in an LP format, but for 5 tracks, for 20 minutes, I think it would work perfectly. Maybe with a full-featured suite of album art and lyrics, similar to the PDF and mp3 package that went with the most recent Saul Williams release.
[this is slightly adapted from a post on my tumblr account.]
2 comments:
Except that MP3s don't support breakpoints, nor do any of the other major audio formats currently used. So it would require a new audio format, all the MP3 player companies to support said format, all so that artists could lump their entire album into a single file that I now have to parse through to get to the song I want...
Which seems to be a step backwards, since we're now in the Cassette/CD experience.
I vote nay.
Sorry, I assumed if it could be done easily in podcasts, it could probably be done easily elsewhere. I agree that having to fast forward, rather than one click skipping, would be a pain in the ass.
Post a Comment