iTunes' Latest Victim: The Record Album

Ever since iTunes started hauling in great big buckets of money, pundits have declared that the end of the album is nigh. But artists -- with the exception of a few online-based auteurs like Jonathan Coulton -- haven't really abandoned the format yet. Well, until recently.

The Guardian's John Harris reports that the group Ash have announced that they're giving up on the album format, instead releasing a series of downloadable singles from now on.

That shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone. As has often been reported, CD sales have been in free-fall, while downloads -- which are generally singles -- are rising. What does surprise me is that Harris laments the impending death of the album as much as he does. "What, for the true fan, will replace the giddy expectation that comes from knowing that your currently cloistered favourites are about to return with their latest opus?" he asks.

Oh, I don't know. How about the music we actually want to hear? Let's face it: when the shuffle feature was invented, a lot of people realized they could mess with the song order of their favorite albums with little or no effect on the overall experience. While some albums (Harris offers The Clash's London Calling, Prince's Sign O'the Times and Blur's Parklife; I offer the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik) are perfectly structured, self-contained gems, the truth is that most people -- music listeners, not music fans -- simply don't care.

You could almost say the CD player was a tacit recognition of this fact. With the program function, people could -- and did -- remove tracks they didn't want to hear, or move them around according to their tastes. People talk about mashups as a way for people to mold pop music as a means of personal expression, but the reality is that we've been doing it since the 1980s, when we realized we didn't have to listen to "Walking in Your Footsteps" if we didn't want to.

Personally, I think Harris is being alarmist. Let's remember, first of all, that the modern pop album is only about sixty years old; for millennia before that, musicians made individual songs or collections of songs of varying lengths as they saw fit for what they were trying to express. What the "death of the album," such as it is, will allow is a return of that choice. Ash can release a series of singles if that works for them. If Mike Oldfield decides that he wants to release an album inspired by a book again, he can. Where Harris sees despair, I see what the Internet and digital technologies often promise: freedom.