As I expected, there's practically no press on Stars' In Our Bedroom After The War. The band and its label, Arts & Crafts, decided to beat piracy to the punch and release the album to digital stores as soon as it was finished. In Our Bedroom has been out one week. The CD won't be available at the end of September.

As of yesterday, there were a total of 381 blog posts about In Our Bedroom After the War (see IceRocket stats and trend). I browsed a bunch of them and saw some (fairly enthusiastic) blog reviews that will be read by a handful of people at most. Where are the gatekeepers? The trendsetters? The tastemakers?

I will use the lack of media attention as Exhibit A in my argument against the popular opinion that bands can painlessly shift from an album-to-album release cycle to a digital-enabled strategy of more frequent and shorter releases (I'll call it "more of less"). If labels are ever going to be mostly marketing entities and become less attached to the album format, as many analysts and pundits suggest, there needs to be a way to market all those releases. Yes, digital distribution allows more frequent releases. Yes, the album is diminishing in popularity. No, it's not that simple. Not yet. There are three main reasons.

First, pretty much everybody sees the album as the start of a new cycle for an artist. Mid-stream releases -- singles or EPs -- don't attract much attention. Consumers have been conditioned to think those are just extra calories to keep fans from getting too hungry between albums. Likewise, bands have been conditioned to release the filler between the main albums. An EP release is rarely a heralded event.

A digital pre-release, as we can see, does not attract much attention unless prodded by the actions of the label, its marketing team and its publicists. You may not want to believe it, but yes, consumers do need that much prodding to buy a new release. (Even when a consumers thinks he/she has "stubmled" upon a new album, it happened because of a coordinated marketing effort.) Come October people are going to be adding In Our Bedroom to their year-end Top 10 list, but they could be doing that right now.

(In an article today, The Times Online's Pete Paphides wrote about The Mercury Prize and acknowledged that "there’s something about the album that still appeals." The nominees' songs do not have the same impact individually, he wrote. When the listener takes a "leap of faith" the album format's "cumulative effect" can be appreciated.)

Second, labels -- and much of the entire mini-industry built upon promoting new releases -- is not built for anything less than an album. As of today, it's not economically feasible to give a big push to a four-song EP, for example, unless it's a loss-leading development strategy. More releases equals more publicists equals greater expenses. For a single or ringtone to be the subject of a marketing campaign, a third-party corporate sponsor would almost definitely have to be involved.

Music promotion is all about timing. The song needs to hit radio/TV commercials/the Internet just as the album comes out, or just as the band is on the road, or just as those magazine covers are getting a lot of eyeballs. An album needs to be on sale while awareness is high. Promotions need to be timed just right. When the timing is off, everything can too easily fall apart.

Third, retailers and the media can become fatigued from too much of an artist. Some retailers like a good amount of time between releases. They base their expected demand on the success of previous releases, and they know not all consumers will pay attention to releases if they aren't properly spaced and properly promoted. (What is a good amount of time between releases? I'd say albums need more than one year between them, and EPs should come no closer than four months to another release.) Press tends to come when the CD is released and when the band is on the road, not when the digital album is released. (Good luck getting an artist to do a round of interviews every time a new track makes its way to online stores...not that the press would pay so much attention.) And critics tend to ignore singles and EPs, two "lesser" forms of art in the eyes of album-listening, album-ranking music writers.

When those three problems are fixed, when new technologies are developed to better "push" music (as opposed to the traditional "pull" required by consumers) and/or when vertically integreted business models allow for different release strategies to succeed, artists will be able to release less music more often. It will be possible eventually. Not for a few years, I'd guess, but technologies will change, the industry will change and people will eventually get used to a new way of doing things.

[music jobs] Director of Content at Dada Entertainment; New York, NY.