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Hypebot Readers On The Future Of The Album

We've been taking an in depth look at the album all week on Hypebot and our readers have shared some very informed opinions.  Here is a small sample"

Record "…the
album became the major format not because the labels were greedy, but
because that was what the people wanted…People voted with their cash…It need not stay that way, but that doesn't make the artistic reasons for releasing an album any less valid."  – Krzysztof Wiszniewski

"The worst
thing in the world would be for labels and artists to buy into the
doomsday prophecies of sideline commentators; the tail wagging the dog." – T.D.

Broken record "some works need to presented within these boundaries…(i.e. Dark Side of the Moon). But we are
no longer constrained to the storage space of discs…we shouldn't talk about the 'album' as if the medium was what
we cared about.- Andrew of Artists House Music

"Vinyl is the ONLY meaningful vessel remaining for album length "statements" – Stephen

Read more comments and get involved in the debate here and here. Vote in our poll here.

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1 Comment

  1. Those who think the album is going to die, do you feel the same way about movies? Are we evolving into a society that wishes to ignore all context? Granted, news stories make it hard to explore context (and the more sympathetic with the elite, the more aggressively it rubs out the context in favor of knee-jerk reactions to emotional issues), but are attention spans really that bad off? Would anyone here prefer to receive the Lord of the Rings trilogy shuffled by scenes?
    It makes me want to assemble a home studio and make a million-selling concept album with long transitions between tracks and over-arching leitmotifs just to prove you wrong. An artist could do this in any genre, mind you. Just because Souljaboy is making the biggest splash as a ringtone doesn’t mean someone can’t come along and produce a complex work that rewards enjoying it whole, uninterrupted in a very popular format.
    It goes both ways, you know: with no vinyl blueprint, singles can be free again. But it also means an artist can release a song that is fifty minutes, two hours, two weeks long, even, and I will be able to load the album that monster comes from onto 1TB hard drive, no problem.
    I think that is the real lesson here, not that artists won’t be making long players. because my prediction is, unless we really become those piles of unthinking blubber in the movie Wall.E, they will.

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