Music is Math

Broken Record, Auntie P, 2005

Like a broken record [industry], people are constantly portending the death of the album. In an age when every released track is a potential chart entry the album is an obsolete collection of songs.

Originally the album was a collection of physical media containing a lengthy coherent piece. The limited length of a single record necessitated that something like Beethoven's Ninth be split across many records bound together like photographs in a photo album. With increasing storage and a commercial and cultural shift in the post-war era toward self-contained songs, the album came to be a compilation of a group's output.

When the compact disc was invented and an entire symphony could be stored on it, was it an album or a collection of movements? The terms album and single are defined by technology and artistic intent. With digital media the product, the container, and the art itself have all conflated. Media, single, song have collapsed into a high bitrate MP3. As the power of compilation is now with the user's ability to generate playlists, the album as a product and release is truly obsolete - the hits compilations will naturally be the first to die.

But the album as an artistic body is alive and well. Within dance music the 12" single has always been the dominant form, whereas rock (perhaps more specifically art and experimental) has used the album as a container for an exploration of themes or genres. The next Dark Side of the Moon is still out there and no more dead than music itself. Mainstream pop has never been about the concept album, rather the group or band is the concept. Whilst everyone has been mourning the reported death of the album, the demise of the B-Side has been tragically overlooked.

In fact, with all these digital copies unbound by physical storage, what do the music charts even mean anymore? Limited production of course results in a limited production run, which defines the ephemeral nature of the charts as a reflection of (passing) popularity. The future of the singles chart as a ranking of more than five decades of tracks perpetually available online will come to resemble the
album chart - home to interminable best-sellers (like Bat Out of Hell for nearly a decade).


Despite incessantly hailing the march of technology, I still buy CDs. That may well be due to growing up in the 90s. I can't imagine it's down to having always bought CDs as I spent the mid 90s taping stuff off the Top 40. I have a modest collection of MP3s mostly obtained in 2005 and 2006 from... well, you know. I had all the music I could ever remember hearing and more I never had or would. Why then did I add six Bowie discs to the shelf this month? I have never been comfortable with paying anything, no matter how little, for a product that is in essence a sequence of flipped magnetic fields on my hard drive, just as easily flipped again to the detriment of data. I've suffered enough drive failures to know that the advantages of portability, reproducibility, and malleability are always haunted by the disadvantage of volatility. My CD collection is the backup for the rips on my drive and iPod.

I did, however, buy some music online at the end of December. I didn't want to obtain it without remunerating the artists and I didn't want to buy a physical release for a single track. Morality and poverty gave way to convenience and I've done it again a few times since. I've never denied the existence of a market in digital media, just that it's never catered to me until now. Still, without continued manufacturing costs this is a licence to print money for the record industry.

Let me summarise the moral of being sued for copyright infringement: you'll be financially better off caught stealing physical media from a shop than downloading a dozen files.

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