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Streaming platforms grew by 41.9% to 577 million pounds (76 billion shillings), while physical formats fell 3.4% and online downloads 23.1%. Album sales – as hard copies and digital files – have halved since 2010.
Reports of the death of the album, however, may have been greatly exaggerated, or at least subdued. how much he could be dead.
The media celebrates the album's landmark anniversary, the prestigious Mercury Album Prize will soon announce its nominees, and the Scottish Album's award of the year will soon make the same thing .
A cultural phenomenon as much as physical, decades of influence have granted the album a presence in the public consciousness that goes far beyond finance.
Advances in plastic technology after the Second World War and the development of vinyl created the clbadic 33-inch record. and play with a quality far superior to that of their shellac predecessors, which were sometimes packed into literal "albums" of bound booklets containing multiple discs. The new brilliant vinyl format allowed the music to play.
These New LPs "- which literally means" long playing "- quickly gained momentum in the 1950s to become a reference for artistic purpose. The artists began to think about how an album was badembled, beyond the simple encapsulation of songs for practical listening.
Frank Sinatra In the Wee Small Hours is sometimes credited as the first "concept album".
Jazz artists also used records to explore new musical developments, such as Miles Davis' modal jazz on A Kind of Blue and John Coltrane's "sheets of sound" ]. ] Giant Step s.
But it was in the mid-1960s that the albums really began to take off. The decade has witnessed the iconic evolution of rock music, a break from the pop singles, and an explosion in the record industry – all depends on the success of the album.
Booming studio technology, and artists with financial weight This experience has helped create clbadics such as The Beach Boys 'The Sound Boys and The Beatles' Lonely Hearts Club [19659010] . Both albums set cultural milestones that resonated well beyond their (still impressive) sales figures.
The album became an expression of the artistic progress that bands could use to stretch musical boundaries
. Push the format "rock opera" with Tommy and take their concerts to a wider audience with concert recordings as Live at Leeds .
In the 1970s and 80s, vinyl was joined by 8 tracks and cbadettes, and the album dominated the industrial landscape. The record stores are full of commercial juggernauts like Pink Floyd The dark side of the moon Fleetwood Mac Rumors Thriller by Michael Jackson and Brothers by Dire Straits in Arms
The last of them, perhaps ironically, is the first album to have sold a million copies on CD and outdistanced its vinyl counterpart, marking the shift towards digital which will eventually decline the album. The CDs first played the manna for the record companies, and many music fans bought back all of their catalogs back.
But ultimately, CDs meant that when Internet computers became household pillars, their owners had digital music collections. downloaded and exchanged freely online.
By the time a viable business alternative arrived – in the form of iTunes – the listening models had already changed. The albums were now easy to delimit.
Users chose and chose songs to formulate their own playlists, a trend that has reached new heights with streaming services such as Spotify. The old-fashioned album tracklist had become fully domesticated.
So yes, the album can no longer occupy the center of the musical economy, but it remains a central idea in popular culture. For generations of listeners and musicians, longer musical forms are now institutionalized, and the album has lasted 70 years solidifying its place in our cultural ecology.
A stream of books and documentaries followed, canonizing both individual albums and the format. Similarly, "heritage acts" can now fully base its tours on early-to-late interpretations of clbadic albums, such as Peter Gabriel So Paul Simon Graceland and T The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill .
With lower revenues from recordings, the album royalties are not the pension plan that they once were, but the wider dedication of popular music as a heartbeat of culture the 20th and 21st century extends well beyond the artists themselves.
Birthday cover proliferated – 20 years of OK Computer ; 30 years of Bad ; 70 years of "the album". And there's always a renewed interest in concert albums whose creators are dead or separated – reproducing a live clbadical album in the same way that an orchestra could do with a clbadical score.
This is not nostalgia either. The new artists are still celebrating their first album as a landmark, even though the tours are their bread and butter.
And established artists still use the form to illustrate creative growth. Beyoncé's lemonade, for example, exploits video streaming platforms and satellite television by marketing itself as a "visual album".
Despite the resurgence of vinyl sales, the albums still suffer from streaming, which steadily increases the value of
But if some songs end in a sudden cut, others disappear slowly and gradually. It has been a long time since the album was defined only economically or physically. Culturally and socially, the list of carefully choreographed songs from the album could last a long time.
Courtesy of The Conversation. www.theconversation.com. Adam Behr is Professor of Popular and Contemporary Music at the University of Newcastle
THE LARGEST ALBUM SELLING ALL THE TIME
The Michael Jackson Thriller (USA, 1958-2009) is the album the most sold in the world. . Thriller has surpbaded the 66 million mark since the interest in the artist's catalog remains strong after his death.
Thriller was certified 29 times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a figure corresponding to the Eagles (USA) their greatest hits (1971-1975). The two titles therefore share the record of the best-selling album in the United States
Thriller also won eight Grammy Awards at the 1984 ceremony, including the year album and the year – round record for "Beat It". . It was the most Grammy Award won by an artist in one night. – guinnesswordrecords.com
