Saving the music album -- the studio mix tape

Bat out of Hell. Srg. Pepper. Led Zeppelin IV. The Wall.

Musicians have made a few excellent albums. But by and large the music industry has delivered a fifty-year swindle to music consumers and their comeuppance has clearly, um, come. By swindle, I simply mean when a band produces one or two excellent singles, and places them on an album with 10 or filler tracks. For literally decades, this was how it was done -- a $3 song was packaged with ten 10 cent songs and sold for $18. Magic value.

Today, these $3 songs are all on sale for $1 at iTunes. So you only buy an album if has the stature of a classic album, like The Wall, or if you just like to own physical media for some reason. The most creative response to this in my view has been to sell albums at the cash in places like Starbucks; Sheryl Crow sort of goes with the Starbucks image and if you're spending $7 on two lattes, maybe you'll spend another $15 on a CD for your car. The other approach, made famous by Radiohead, has been to sell the album on a pay-what-you-can basis; this is not a bad approach either. Certainly, if you imagine bands receiving just $1 or $2 per CD sold, then by delivering albums direct (less production and any marketing costs) it wouldn't be hard to match or beat that; heck, sell the whole album for $1.50 and then sell a bonus video for $1 -- you're already ahead.

But I thought today that there is another approach that tackles the core flaw in retail music. Perhaps the meaning of the album needs to be revisited. Instead of an album being the coherent narrative of, say, five guys in a beach house over a month, let it incorporate more than one solo artist. What I'm proposing is part way between a compilation CD and a classic album. Imagine if Sheryl Crow, Taylor Swift and ... I don't know ... KELLY CLARKSON, got together and released an album with 12 songs -- four each. There would be little or no overlap in vocals, but substantial cooperation in theme, lyrics, production, etc., so the coherence of a classic album emerges.

The album would be released with a title reflecting its narrative, not their brands -- something like Sand in the Sunscreen; -- I have no idea. But with a coherent theme and narrative there is a coherent audience; such an approach captures not only the built in audience for each artist, but also a new audience for their narrative. There's also the benefit of being so big that the publicity outweighs what it otherwise would -- a $5 million lottery prize receives an average number of purchased tickets, but a $25 million lottery prize might receive an extra $10 million worth of tickets, so that $5 million = $5 million, but $25 million = $35 million.

Or, in this case, 1+1+1 = 5.

Finally, taking such an approach and labelling it as a series -- something similar to the "unplugged" series in the 1990s -- produces an additional benefit in that consumers would come to expect the all killer, no filler quality of the product.

Note: this is my first post actually written for the Kindred Crowd blog; the previous ones were just the tech-related posts written for my personal blog.