Album era

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The Album era was a period in English-language popular music from the mid 1960s to the mid 2000s in which the album was the dominant form of recorded music expression and consumption. It was primarily driven by three successive music recording formats, the 33 1⁄3 rpm phonograph (gramophone) record, the audiocassette and the music compact disc.

Origins

Technological developments in the early twentieth century led to the development of the vinyl long-playing (LP) album as an important medium for recorded music. In 1952, Columbia Records began to bring out 33 1⁄3 rpm twelve-inch extended-play LPs that could play for as long as 52 minutes, or 26 minutes per side. Musical film soundtracks, jazz works, and thematic albums by singers such as Frank Sinatra quickly utilized the new longer format. However, in the 1950s and into the 1960s, 45 rpm seven-inch single sales were considered the primary market for the recorded music industry, while albums were a secondary market. The careers of notable rock and roll performers such as Elvis Presley were driven primarily by single sales.

The LP era: The golden age of the album

The dominance of the single as the primary medium of music sales changed with the release of several iconic concept albums in the 1960s, such as A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector (1963), the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds (1966), the Mothers of Invention's Freak Out! (1966), and the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967).[1] During Pet Sounds' composition and production, Beach Boys bandleader Brian Wilson found the American version of the Beatles' Rubber Soul (1965) to be "a collection of songs that…somehow went together like no album ever made before", which inspired Wilson to briefly shift his focus from singles to albums.[2] Frank Zappa has said that within Freak Out!, "It wasn't as if we had a hit single and we needed to build some filler around it. Each tune had a function."[3]

In reference to the Beatles and Beach Boys mid-1960s work, writer Bill Martin noted: "In the wake of these albums, many rock musicians took up the 'complete album approach.'"[4] Rolling Stone Assistant Editor Andy Greene felt that, "[Sgt. Peppers] was the beginning of the album era. It was the big bang of albums. This was the first concept album. All the songs go together to tell a story, and it's inspired every musician,"[5] whereas music journalist Stephen Davis believed Pet Sounds to be the first rock concept album for its "trenchant cycle of love songs [that] has the emotional impact of a shatteringly evocative novel, and by God if this little record didn't change only the course of popular music, but the course of a few lives in the bargain."[6] Barbara Ellen of The Guardian added: "[On Pet Sounds] Wilson single-handedly reinvented the album as the in-depth illumination of an artist’s soul, kicking open a creative fire-door, liberating the album to exist as a self-contained art form on a par with literature, theatre, art, cinema, dance… anything the artist desired."[7]

The mid 1960s to the late 1970s was the era of the LP and the "golden era" of the album.[8] "These were the years when the music industry exploded to become bigger than Hollywood."[8] This period, especially the 1970s, is also called the Album Rock Era.[lower-alpha 1]

Along with the LP record, the 8-track tape was another format popular in the United States in this period.

Cassettes and compact discs

Although the fall of LP record sales at the end of the 1970s and rise of first the cassette and then the CD as the dominant format for recorded music saw the end of the LP-driven "golden age" of the album, the album consolidated its domination of the recorded music market. Seven-inch vinyl single sales were dropping and were almost totally displaced by cassette singles by the end of the 1980s. Yet these were never as popular as seven-inch singles and they and the subsequent CD singles never amounted to a significant threat to the dominance of the album.

The primary threat to the album's primacy in the 1980s and early 1990s came from MTV. It was quickly recognized that, "after the album-rock era of the 1970s, MTV helped return the hit single to prominence as a pop marketing tool".[11]

The end of the Album Era

By the middle of the 1990s, single song delivery of music to the consumer was almost dead, at least in the United States.[12] In 1998, Billboard magazine ended the requirement of a physical single for charting on its Hot 100 chart after several of the year's major hits were not released as singles.

But, despite the dominance of the CD, technological changes quickly turned the tables. In 1999, the internet peer-to-peer file sharing service Napster allowed internet users to easily download single songs in MP3 format. By early 2001, Napster use peaked with 26.4 million users worldwide,.[13]

Although Napster was shut down in 2001 for copyright violations, other music download services took its place. In 2001, Apple Inc.'s iTunes service was introduced and the iPod, a consumer-friendly MP3 player, was released later that year. This and other legal alternatives as well as illicit file sharing continued to depress sales of recorded music on physical formats. By 2006, downloaded digital single sales outnumbered CD sales for the first time and buyers of digital music purchased singles over albums by a margin of 19:1.[12] Even music industry executives were forced to admit that the album was on its way out. "For some genres and some artists, having an album-centric plan will be a thing of the past," Capitol-EMI's COO Jeff Kempler said. Other warnings were more dire. Media researcher Aram Sinnreich bluntly predicted that "the album is going to die. Consumers are listening to play lists" on their MP3 players.[12]

With consumers abandoning albums, performers "started concentrating on dishing out singles as opposed to churning out albums".[14] Critics of the trend argued that single songs "never truly showed an artist’s true prowess and every singer or songwriter proved to be a one-hit wonder".[14] Although CD and digital download albums continue to be marketed, by the 2010s, many of the best-selling albums were by legacy performers who had seen success earlier in the Album Era. The inclusion of streaming in the album charts of multiple countries, moving away from pure sales to newly-called album-equivalent units, has partially reverted what had become a bias towards older-skewing acts in these charts; for example, Migos' 2017 album Culture debuted only at number 46 on the sales-only UK album chart[15] but heavy plays from a younger audience on streaming services pushed it to number 16 on the overall album chart.[16]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Music critic Dave Marsh has called Jimi Hendrix's 1967 "Purple Haze" the "debut single of the Album Rock Era"[9] while Stephen Thomas Erlewine called Lou Gramm's 1987 "Midnight Blue" the "last great single of the album-rock era".[10]

References

  1. ↑ Julien, Oliver (2013). Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2013. ISBN 9781409493822.
  2. ↑ Stevens, Robert (October 24, 2007). "An Evening with Brian Wilson: The Palace Theatre in Manchester, England—September 23, 2007". wsws.org. Retrieved March 3, 2009.
  3. ↑ Zappa, Frank; Occhiogrosso, Peter (1989). The Real Frank Zappa Book. New York: Poseidon Press. pp. 65–80. ISBN 0-671-70572-5.
  4. ↑ Martin, Bill (1998). Listening to the Future: the Time of Progressive Rock, 1968-1978 (1. print. ed.). Chicago, Ill. [u.a.]: Open Court. p. 41. ISBN 0-8126-9368-X.
  5. ↑ Chris Kokenes. "'A Day in the Life' Lyrics to be Auctioned." CNN.com. 30 April 2010. Retrieved 5 January 2014.
  6. ↑ Stephen Davis (June 22, 1972). "Pet Sounds". Rolling Stone.
  7. ↑ Ellen, Barbara (January 31, 2016). "Was 1966 pop music’s greatest year?". The Guardian.
  8. 1 2 Synopsis of "When Albums Ruled the World." from BBC Four's The Golden Age Of The Album series. Retrieved 5 January 2014.
  9. ↑ Dave Marsh. Review of "Purple Haze" in The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made. Dave Marsh. Da Capo Press, 1999. p. 178. ISBN 9780306809019
  10. ↑ Stephen Thomas Erlewine. Review of Jukebox Heroes: The Foreigner Anthology in All Music Guide Required Listening: Classic Rock. Chris Woodstra, John Bush and Stephen Thomas Erlewine, eds. Hal Leonard Corporation, 2007. p. 72. ISBN 9780879309176
  11. ↑ Jon Pareles. "Pop View: As MTV Turns 10, Pop Goes the World." The New York Times. 7 July 1991. Retrieved 5 January 2014.
  12. 1 2 3 Jeff Leeds. "The Album, a Commodity in Disfavor." The New York Times. 26 March 2007. Retrieved 5 January 2014.
  13. ↑ Jupiter Media Metrix (July 20, 2001). Global Napster Usage Plummets, But New File-Sharing Alternatives Gaining Ground. Press Release.
  14. 1 2 Tejas Morey. "How iTunes Changed The Music Industry Forever." MensXP (Times of India). Retrieved 5 January 2014.
  15. ↑ Official UK Album Sales Chart published on 3rd February 2017
  16. ↑ Official overall UK Album Chart for the same week
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