“Over the past few years, we have watched Apple climb the music sales chart courtesy of the iTunes. Last month we learned that Apple passed Best Buy to become the number two retailer in the the US. Now, Apple has ascended to the top of the charts, surpassing Wal-Mart for the first time ever, according to the NPD MusicWatch Survey,” Eric Bangeman reports for Ars Technica.
“The news was announced in an e-mail sent this afternoon to some Apple employees, a copy of which was seen by Ars Technica. It includes a screenshot of an Excel file showing the top ten music retailers in the US for January 2008, and Apple is at the top of the list,” Bangeman reports.
“For the music industry, there is a dark side to Apple’s ascension to the top of the charts. Buying patterns for digital downloads are different, as customers are far more likely to cherry pick a favorite track or two from an album than purchase the whole thing. In contrast, brick-and-mortar sales are predominantly high-margin CDs,” Bangeman reports.
More in the full article, including the screenshot of the NPD data, here.
In other words, now you’re no longer forced to buy artificial constructs called “albums” which are nothing more than bundles developed by the music cartels to get more of your money for less effort. The album is – plain and simple – a bundling technique. Take some marketable material, add a greater percentage of filler, call it an “album,” pretend it’s “art,” and charge more than you could charge for just the worthwhile bits. When the music industry began, they sold single songs. The album is a marketing tool that the music cartels developed later in order to charge more than they could get if they allowed the consumer choice.
Is it “art” that an album is between 30-60 minutes? No, that length is based on nothing more than how much the physical recording mediums could hold at the time the artificial album construct began to be marketed.
While some small percentage of artists throughout the history of the album construct have taken the concept to an art form (from The Beatles to Pink Floyd to Coheed and Cambria), thereby elevating it beyond a mere product bundle, and more than few music customers have bought so fully into the “album” marketing construct as to defend it passionately today, that does not change the fact that the album is a product bundle designed to collect more money for the good stuff by bundling it with some percentage of the not-so-good stuff (filler).
Nobody’s stopping anyone from buying all the songs in an album. The difference today is: now there’s choice not to buy all the songs in an album. The paradigm has shifted.
If the music business wants to sell more songs, they need to write, perform, and record better songs. It’s that simple. It’s all about choice. The consumer now has the power to choose; we’re no longer stuck having to buy dreck in order to get what we want. You can thank Apple, and Steve Jobs in particular, for that freedom.