The internet changed the face of music almost from the get go, but it wasn’t until relatively recently that it was for the better. Music downloading led first to people basically stealing from the artists song by song, and then to bands creating collections of songs as opposed to actually making legitimate albums (that is, because people were stealing and/or buying music a song at a time, there was no longer an impetus to make a complete work).
Soon, things became more nebulous, as websites like MySpace turned the internet into a tool that makes more bands than it breaks. But for the most part, the worldwide web was still looked at as the bane of the music industry.
A few months ago, however, Radiohead stirred things up. They weren’t the first band to give their album away for free online, but they were inarguably the biggest. Moreover, they did so with no buildup; the idea was announced only 10 days before the release.
At that point, the internet basically exploded. Blogs and message boards were immediately abuzz with discussion. A record release was again an event.
Since then, a few other artists have followed suit. Nine Inch Nails offered a version of their newest release for free online, and after Gnarls Barkley’s latest effort was leaked online, the band pushed up the actual release.
Basically, this whole interwebz thing is proving to be rather beneficial to real artists (although record labels and the “musicians” that wouldn’t exist without them will likely still cry). What comes after this distributive freedom, though?
Creative freedom.
Popular music in this country has always been confined by the medium. That is, music could only be made if it was short enough to fit onto a vinyl LP/cassette/compact disk. Sure, there have been double albums, but most of them have been historical footnotes, and the few good ones have been at least a bit cumbersome.
Article comments
1 - charlie
Thanks for this article. I am a casual Flaming Lips fan (I have a couple of CDs of theirs) but had no idea about their epic 1997 series of releases. Having four albums made of parts of songs that can be put together to sound like a full song only by listening to them all simultaneously sounds freakin cool nowadays (in the digital era). Maybe some artists will do something similar one of these days, perhaps only using two albums instead of four. It's a hard sell doing this though, and would likely be done by whatever band as a side project or a fun experiment.