Death of the CD....

           This is another of those subjects that has been on my mind for a long time. With all the new technology around, being introduced at an ever-faster pace, it was quite sometime ago that the headline was announced on my good old-fashioned TV screen: "The CD is dead".
           Only a matter of time, they said. And dying with it, the idea of "the album"...collections of music from a particular artist. People will pick & choose individual pieces of music, archive them on a storage device of their choosing, and then play back whatever they want whenever they want.
         My mouth gaped uncharacteristically open; to me the CD was NEW technology. One that had the potential to dominate media playback for the forseeable future.

        I can't be sure if the end of "albums" is in fact in sight or not. There are several factors in play that could affect the outcome, so I don't claim to have a see-all, know-all attitude. But my chips are betting on the deeper parts of human nature winning out in the end. Let me explain...

       I believe the conclusion that "albums are doomed" is based on the demonstrable fact that the vast majority of music buyers are young (teens & twenties) and that is what drives this phenomenon. I remember that during that period of my own life that many things in life were new and exciting and you want to sample it all.
      My analogy is that music (at that age) is like a salad bar. You pay your money and go WOW!
"I want to try this! I want to try that!" and you load up your plate until you can't eat any more....until next time, when you do it all again; eating more of what you like & trying stuff you didn't get to try last time...This phase may go on for years.
        But as time passes, and experiences build up, a process of discrimination begins to operate in human beings: the things that weren't really that great you eventually stop going for. Even the good ones, you have to ask yourself, "Which things would I rather have  more of today?". And you end up leaving behind something that's "pretty good" so that you can have more of the good and still have a helping of something "great".
       With music this is especially so...very similar in a way to selecting a mate. You surround yourself by great music, with some good stuff out on the periphery for when you're in certain moods...And then one day you hear a song that just hits you RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES...and you think, "Wow, that song is just like that artist knows me...how I feel, what I'm thinking...and plus revealed to me new things about myself that I never realized. I wonder what else they've written and recorded??"

      Now you have someone who is a potential "album buyer", who maybe doesn't just want to collect a bunch of songs, but would find a deep attachment to a statement in the form of a "collection of pieces" designed BY that artist to form a synergistic entity.

      Of course, I could be wrong. There is a powerful force in what we are exposed to when we are young. A generation never exposed to albums may never be aware what they are missing out on.
     On the other hand, things in this universe go around in cycles. Maybe after a couple generations without albums, someone will "discover" that if they put collections of music in a package and market them together, people will find the value in it...and they will then be announcing the "re-birth of the album".