[atlantaprog] Re: Fwd: [ARTNEWS] death of the album?

...there's still more to albums than just the music. There's that whole mystique...power, mystery, the hammer of the gods...that comes with the purchasing of an artifact, closing yourself in, slipping into the player, immersing yourself in the thing and developing an attachment to not only the songs, but to the sequence of songs. You can't get that from a CD burner, a stack of CDRs and a Sharpie.

I suppose that's true, and I understand where you're coming from. OTOH, I've actually fallen out of listening in sequence over the past few years; that may be partly a consequence of doing most of my CD listening in my car, where I rarely take trips long enough to last a whole album, but I was doing it in my kiddie years, too, usually taking just one side at a time, if that. I felt perfectly free to listen just to whatever tune was in my head at the moment. (Of course, that assumes that I'm already familiar enough with the album to have tunes in my head. I tended to listen to album sides straight through right after I got an album; later, after I'd assimilated the album, I'd sometimes be pickier. CD's, of course, make this much easier.)

Maybe there could be an analagous experience when downloading, with pieces bundled together for a slight discount and a sort of "opening sequence," like the "splash screen" that appears when an application program is activated, that would have much the same resonance as the opening of an album cover.

OTOH, maybe the "mystique" itself will be enough to keep the album format alive. In fact, I suspect the odds favor it. In any event, I think people will find ways of working around it.

Of course, right now I am still reeling over the fact of Brian Wilson performing Smile.

Yeah. I'd heard about this a few months ago, but didn't know he was actually recording it. I wonder how (or how widely) it'll be marketed... :-P It's not as if *The Lifehouse Chronicles* exactly tore up the charts, did it?

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