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iTunes Album Debate: Stop Using Apples & Oranges

From the Billboard to The Wall Street Journal, the debate rages on. Has iTunes killed the album? Would Kid Rock have sold more or less if he’d gone on iTunes. (LESS) Was Atlantic smart to pull the Estelle single off iTunes just as it was climbing the chart? (NO)  Would AC/DC sell even more if they finally went digital. (YES, particularly if they stuck to album only)

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There are three things that really bother me about this debate:

  1. The economy is a mess and we all should be concentrating on ways to re-build the music business; not endlessly debating if Steve Job is the devil. (HINT: He’s not a God either)
  2. Kid Rock is nobody’s hero. He’s a smart businessman who knows his audience. He would sell his wares from the back of a garbage truck if he thought it would reach his audience. (it might) He is NOT an industry hero.
  3. The folks who write these endless stories need to remember that artists and their audiences come in all shapes and sizes:

  • Kid_rock
    While Kid Rock wrote a masterful single, his audience still wants the whole album. Why give them the chance to buy anything else?
  • Estelle‘s audience doesn’t give a crap about anything but the song. Sell them what they want.
  • Stop comparing AC/DC‘s impressive non-digital sales to The Beatles and Rolling Stones.
    Some kids and oldsters still (amazingly) care about this band. No
    self-respecting teen would be caught dead buying a Beatles or Stones
    album.

Different sales strategies will work
for different bands. Those of us that market music need to view each
artist’s realtionship with their audience as unique and stop comparing apples to oranges. Bruce Houghton

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7 Comments

  1. Kid Rock didn’t write a masterful single. He grafted together two AOR staples and called it new. Kid Rock could be the next P. Diddy at this rate.
    That aside, I disagree slightly with what you’re saying about his situation. Yeah, his fans might want the whole album, but I have to wonder how many casual radio listeners would have bought “All Summer Long” had it been available. I think the fact that a cover version was riding high on the iTunes charts for a while tells me there were a lot of people just interested in that song.
    And AC/DC, I’ve never really considered them an album band (and yes, I have them all, excepting the new one as I won’t shop Wal-Mart) but they’ve been out there railing about Apple killing the album. Guys, I love you but you’re not exactly creating conceptual masterpieces here.

  2. “No self-respecting teen would be caught dead buying a Beatles or Stones album.”
    Yeah, think you are pretty far off the mark on that one…I actually think a lot of their continued sales are attributed to every generation of mid teens discovering them.

  3. one of the key issues in this debate is a very old issue in the music biz: does releasing singles help or hurt an artist in the long run ? i’m not taking sides, but this debate has raged for decades before iTunes was around…

  4. No self-respecting teen would be caught dead buying a Beatles album?
    Are you kidding?
    I was the manager of a Beatles memorabilia store for four years and teenagers were some of the most avid, enthusiastic, and voracious Beatle-maniacs.
    And whether or not the kids are into the Beatles, there is no way that one can suggest that the kids are more into AC-DC than the Fab Four.

  5. “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main” – John Donne
    Everyone is missing the point with this discussion.
    The thing to think about is not weather Kid Rock would have made more money selling his recordings on iTunes, but would the industry as a whole have made more money if Kid Rock had sold his recordings on iTunes.
    The real question is how many Lynard Skynard and Warren Zevon records would have been sold?
    I say shame on you Kid Rock.

  6. Let’s all be honest with ourselves – the record companies killed the album format by releasing albums with one good song on them. How many of us have bought complete CDs because they liked one song only to find they hated the other music on the album? I know I have more times than I care to remember. By putting out such questionable product for so long, the music industry has conditioned the audiences to key in on the one good song.
    Credit Apple with giving the consumer the flexibility with purchasing music in the way they want, not the way the music industry arbitrarily dictates. I purchase most of my music on iTunes and I do usually buy the complete album. However, in those cases when I really only like one or two songs, I love the fact that’s all I need to buy.
    The artists shouldn’t be afraid of this. If they put out a good product that people want, they will buy the whole album. Those casual fans who only want to buy one or two songs are bonus revenue since they probably would have never bought the album anyway.
    I’ve bought far more music in the digital download age than I ever bought in the CD era. The record companies and musical artists would do well to embrace the future and provide their product in a way the consumer wants it. While I recognize that iTunes is not a 100% perfect solution, I give Apple tremendous credit for considering the consumer first an foremost.

  7. What he said. I couldn’t agree more with J Powell. Only good can come from giving consumers freedom of choice. The album lives on for artists that actually offer an album and not just a collection of questionable singles.

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