BBC Radio 1 thinks the album is dead. Heres what I think. Yesterday, The Guardian posted an article on the inevitable and imminent death of the ‘album’. This apocryphal future for LP’s was based on dwindling album sales for major artists and the proclamations of George Ergatoudis, Head of Music at BBC Radio 1 and 1Extra. As someone who has just spent the last 18 months of my life and most of my personal savings to make my second album, at first I was incensed. I spent four years busking to try and get a record deal, and it was my lifelong dream to make a real ‘album’, so how dare someone declare its death and irrelevance? My instinctive urge to defend albums against the contemporary tide of ‘mix-tape’ playlists, and the trend of listening to music on Spotify and YouTube gave way to a graver realisation: there is a lot of truth in what the article is saying. The album as it has evolved in recent times is dying, but from where I’m standing the reasons are much more subtle than the Radio 1 head would have us believe. The album is in undeniably in commercial trouble in the mass market, and its relevance as the format of the future is in doubt, but I disagree with Mr Ergatoudis that as artists we’ll all adapt to a new ‘singles based’ culture given time. I’m 32, which in Radio One’s world pretty much makes me a dinosaur, but I want to defend the LP, and fight for its relevance as a piece of work capable of achieving much more than singles alone. There is no doubt that we are living in an era where an unprecedented demand is placed on our increasingly limited time. We multi-task more and are more easily distracted by the myriad multi-media attractions only ever a click away. This has taken its toll on our attention spans, and in that context, the album undeniably has a much tougher battle on its hands to win over new audience, and hold its interest. I hold that my upcoming album is much stronger as a whole than it is as individual tracks. But it was produced that way. I want it to seduce you over its thirty four minutes and take you on a journey. I would like to think that the long route taken is more nourishing than any one of its songs in isolation. And the path through the album - the sequencing - has been chosen to serve the album and the listener’s experience as a whole, not commercial concerns over radio play for singles. I realise that in that sense I am swimming dangerously against the tide. For a long time albums have been front loaded with appealing singles followed by ‘weaker’ tracks from middle to back. This tendency, originally attributed to listening stations in retail stores, will only be concentrated by streaming software as many people will listen to the first few seconds of the first few tracks and if not immediately won over, move on. The unfortunate consequence of this is that only bombastic, quickly appealing work is likely to gain a mainstream audience. Also, as iTunes has shown, the most popular tracks stay at the top, where they maintain prominence and monopolise. Many modern day albums put out by major labels and aimed at mass market release are painstakingly constructed to succeed in just this climate. They are produced by innumerable different teams, with mixes shopped around to different producers to try and make the most appealing, risk-averse product possible. I know of at least one signed artist who had recorded over twenty tracks all with different super producers and celebrity co-writes only for most of them to never see the light of day. By the end they didn’t know who they were anymore. How was that ever going to be a coherent record? It didn’t matter, the label were looking for singles. The increasing risk-aversion shown on radio playlists and TV programs only perpetuates this trend. As their relevance in relation to streaming products dwindles, they are focussing more and more on big names and major label artists with songs which are safe, because those acts have an established appreciative audience already. A big band with a bold single is a much easier bet than a young contemplative singer-songwriter. And the new artists that do break through these walls are nearly always backed by the big money PR of a major label, led by a radio friendly single, carefully honed to be appealing to the masses. The album as a format is therefore hugely secondary to the lethal combination of PR saturation and a catchy single. In the pop world of course, it has ever been thus, but if Mr Ergatoudis is right, and that becomes universal, many non-pop artist’s careers will choke out. Those of us who don’t make the right kind of music for afternoon radio play singles, if he is right, will whither and die, along with the LP. To be blunt. If the album dies, so do the kind of artists who make them. Recent criticism of Jake Bugg’s Glastonbury set perhaps highlight the dangers of the current approach. Many people have argued that he did not have the quantity of quality material to perform a full length set. But his massive profile made him a safe bet for Glastonbury programmers to pull in the crowds. What they got, in a sense, was the kind of live performance that parallels most albums; ‘Some really good singles, but a lot of filler’ was the summary from many quarters. If we want great albums and broad live sets, surely we need to get back to developing and championing them? Be brave enough to promote an artist’s more subtle work as well as their hooks? The BBC could use its non-commercial position to champion real independent young artists, across a more challenging spectrum and open up its playlists to them. They could actually discuss and critique albums as well as singles as viable pieces of musical work. George Ergatoudis’s pessimism frightens the hell out of me, because it may just be representative of the whole top table, and that means its unlikely many of the really talented people I meet all the time are going to get a chance, because they aren’t quite radiogenic enough. And yet, I have faith that there is a more complex and varied audience than George Ergatoudis believes. I hope that what will actually happen is the death of the front loaded ‘filler’ album, the LP as the unwieldy carriage for a few great singles and a load of tracks no-one will hear. If artists make beautiful, consistent albums, then I believe people will want to hear them, grow to love them and appreciate that they can do certain things that single songs cannot. And those great albums can live alongside great singles.Perhaps we should appreciate that the aim of the album and a radio single in modern times is not always mutual. I admit I felt a surge of anxiety when I read the article. I have spent my savings and a year and half of my life to make an album that stands against everything it predicts. I put the strongest songs where I felt they worked the best for that album, and produced them in a way that I felt communicated their message and the story of the album loudest, rather than most appealing to radio playlisters. Whatever happens, I’m proud of those decisions. I don’t think the album is any more dead than the novel or the motion picture, its just bloody hard to make a good one, and even harder to get it heard right now.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 10:37:03 +0000