In a post yesterday, I took issue with a quote in The Wall Street Journal by analyst Aram Sinnreich that said albums were on their last gasp. Aram emailed to me some comments and I am posting them here. He has a much different outlook that I have on the way music will be presented in the future. I believe the album format will continue to live through changes in music stores and services. Over 400 million albums were purchased last year. Fewer will be purchased this year, and fewer next year, but I see no signs of complete extinction or irrelevance within the next 20 years. Here are Aram's comments:

As to the LP sales, I would argue that they could almost be reclassified as merchandise, rather than recorded music -- a significant number of purchasers are buying them to /have/, not to listen to (the audiophile market notwithstanding).

And, yes, digital album sales are relatively strong, but neither the single nor the album product format adequately addresses the way today's music fans are actually listening.

The new dominant consumption format is the playlist. Only business models that address this behavior -- such as online radio, subscriptions, and ISP taxes -- will take full advantage of consumers' rapidly expanding tastes. The album -- ten songs by a single artist in a fixed order -- just doesn't cut it in this context. And the inevitable death of the CD as a distribution format (it will live on as a storage format) will cement the death of the album, which is essentially an arbitrary product based on the limited capacity of 20th century recording and distribution technology.

My quotes were taken in the context of this larger argument, and of course, were presented as stand-alones in the final article.

Thank you for the context, Aram. Even with that added color, I still disagree wholeheartedly. Some people listen to music in playlists, but they also switch to shuffle and listen to music randomly. The random button is no more a death blow to the album than is the playlist. My main point is that playlists are a popular way to enjoy music but not nearly as popular a way to purchase music. The Wall Street Journal article was about purchasing, not listening. A distinction between the two must be understood. Even if people do not always listen to an album from start to finish (I prefer listening to an album from start to finish, and do it all the time) they will still buy (or steal, or copy) a collection of tracks, often bundled with artwork and probably some liner notes, in a format called an album. Stores and services will continue to offer playlists, I have no doubt, but they will be just one way to acquire and experience music.

The underlying message of the WSJ article is that artists will act in their own self interest, and in many cases offering only an album is in their best interest. But it goes beyond that. It is in the self interest of nearly all recording artists to offer more than individual songs. When those songs are bundled, we call it an album. In 20 years, maybe the bundle will be called something else (I won't get too caught up in semantics). It's a product that works well. This has everything to do with marketing and nothing to do with 20th century storage devices. Selling singles is a less efficient way to monetize demand and make use of time spent creating the finished product (think of costs differences between large batches versus single runs). For many fans, purchasing an album is in their best interest. It is the most economical way to obtain music the they want. If everybody is acting in their self interests, albums will continue to exist.

Update: I'm tacking on Aram's reply in an email exchange. We could probably go back and forth on this forever. We're on the same page in some areas and miles apart in other areas. The album debate is always a good one, isn't it?

> Why dismiss billions of dollars in consumer >> spending? Because sales aren't what they used to be?

Yes, that's part of it, but the diminishing sales are only symptomatic of the larger structural problem(s). The sales aren't what they used to be because (a) labels are shipping fewer units of fewer albums by fewer
artists, (b) brick-and-mortar retailers are devoting fewer square feet to CDs, in favor of higher margin entertainment goods like movies, games and portable electronics, and most importantly (c) because consumers no longer see value in the album as a format. How could they, when the iPod they just got in their stocking holds 20,000 songs?

> Playlists are a way in which music is organized and heard, correct? (And
>> occasionally purchased at digital music stores.) That's different than
>> the way music is packaged by labels/artists and purchased by customers.
>> To say playlists are "consumed" does not draw a distinction between
>> purchasing and listening.

This is true, but the health of an industry can be measured in terms of how closely product models match consumption habits. The delta tends to be greater in industries that are consolidated and capital-intensive
(like the music industry used to be) and lesser in those that are more diversified and have a lower bar to entry (the direction the industry is moving in, major label mergers notwithstanding).

> Even if ISP-based, all-you-can-eat
>> subscription services become the norm, artists will still release albums
>> and people will still acquire albums.

This is probably true in the near term, because both artists and consumers are comfortable with the format, and because marketers know how to promote them. But they'll be albums in name only; already, we're
seeing singles released as ringtones and video game soundtracks before they ever get (officially) burned to a CD. Eventually, the album becomes a pure ersatz marketing event, and the innovative artists and marketers will be those that successfully shatter the illusion and find a different way to bundle music for consumers. Pioneering independent musicians are already doing this by releasing new songs, drafts, and
even individual tracks on their web sites and blogs, as they produce the music.