Q is for Singles and Albums

The arrival of digital music has meant several things for the way we listen to music and the way it is made. Musically there seems to be a return to a pre-Beatles singles culture, where individual songs are more important than full albums. Obviously it doesn't work to use a full album as the background music to  your Youtube video, or as the song that welcomes viewers to your Myspace page, or as your ringtone (it'd probably be best for phones to not ring constantly for 40-80 min anyway). Furthermore, while you can certainly listen to full albums on your iPod, digital music players are like pocket juke boxes. It's the ultimate mix making machine. How can you resist the temptation to tailor a playlist to the moment?

Artists are adjusting to the change differently. The recently reunited (sort of) Smashing Pumpkins announced recently that they plan to never record a full album again; they will only release singles. Frontman and songwriter Billy Corgan says people don't want anything but the hits. Meanwhile Jay-Z wouldn't sell his album American Gangster through iTunes because he wanted to ensure that people would listen to the album as a whole and not just download the song “Roc Boys” (I still found a way to just download the one song).   

Many songs seem to work better as singles than as album cuts though. An example would be “Take On Me” by A-ha. I bought the full LP containing this song a couple years ago, and while the whole album is surprisingly solid, that opening track feels like its own entity. If the tracks were paintings hung in a gallery, “Take On Me” would need its own room. I don't think the song is necessarily better than the others on Hunting High and Low, but it was meant to be a single. I would guess that, of the people who have heard “Take On Me,” over 99% of them heard it as a single instead of in context with the album. In fact, when I get to the end of the song my mind does not expect to hear track two of the album, Hunting High and Low. I naturally assume an 80s pop hit by another band will come on next, because the context of the song is usually a mix disc or an 80s radio show like “Retro in the Metro.”    

Because of digital music stores like iTunes no one has to pay $10 for a reissue CD of Hunting High and Low if all they want to hear is “Take On Me.” They can buy that one song for $.99 (I actually only paid $3 for the whole album, but not everyone is ready to re-embrace the turntable and vinyl records.)

I admit I have often listened through full albums that had plenty of filler just out of the principle of listening to the whole album. The assumption is that the artist put much time and energy into the whole thing, that every track is like a child to the artist. With some albums this is the case, and every track is phenomenal because the album is made up of only 12 or 14 songs chosen from the 50 that came out of the recording sessions. But then there are artists that have just one good song that they didn’t even write (an example being Natalie Imbruglia and her hit “Torn”) and the rest of the album is mediocre, even if written by the artist on the cover.

I’m not sure what I’m trying to say exactly. Listen to full albums. Feel free to listen to singles. I think the act of listening to just one song gets a bad rap, as though the listener is doing the artist an injustice. Some songs, like “Torn,” work great as singles. On the other hand, some stellar albums are ignored because all that stands out is the single.