The Age of the Album is Dead; Long Live the Age of Music

Alexander P. Brown
Staff Writer
alexanderparisbrown [at] gmail.com

I don’t know how you feel about it, but I have no issue weaving A Tribe Called Quest, Roy Ayers, Soulstice, and PJ Harvey into one playlist to suit my aural and emotional needs of the moment. What used to take the elementary school version of me days of patient radio listening and cassette management, now can be done in seconds with a flick of my thumb. And to be honest, that’s how most of the world does it as well.

So if albums as more than promo tools are no longer standard, what is there left for the consumer to readily imbibe in from their most loved of acts? Well at the risk of being obvious, there will always be the live set, and no amount of tech will strip away feeling of being enveloped by the music as a performer creates it.

Even the gluttonous Nineteen-Nineties and early Aughts are a model for the highlighting of live performances. Despite record shattering album sales from immaculately crafted pop acts N*Sync and Britney Spears, the decade was characterized by the must-see live shows of the otherwise offbeat jammy stylings the Dave Matthews Band and the over-the-hill and back again croonings of The Rolling Stones. And despite neither group offering a strong new album showing (critically or commercially) in years, they continue to be stadium-sized artists.

This is where jazz has a very noticeable advantage over most musical genres. Many current musicians leave space in their set for improvisation, thus nearly every concert is a wholly exclusive event unto itself. In this way, music and performance are no longer being sold, but a once-in-lifetime event merely bracketed by the air of a familiar tune or a known chord progression. Jazz musicians even do this with other genre’s music, turning the comfortable and familiar into a twisted magnificent doppelganger that bares a tiny resemblance to its previous forms.

It’s no longer selling art, selling music, that is the basis of the industry; now it is selling experiences. That makes musicians less entertainment (for people can be entertained in the smallest of ways these days) and more shamans, speaking to place in the human mind which can only be activated when a certain note hits them full force from the stage.

Hopefully technology will catch up and allow for the quick recording and distribution of even snippets of certain performances, thus further entrancing the listeners with a memento of the ceremony and strengthening the bonds between audience and performer. But even then, it’ll be what artists do live to captivate the audience that will make or break a career and not just a mathematical formula on the Billboard 200.

Alexander Brown is a freelance writer. More of his work can be found at his blog, Relax and Aspire.