extra notes, "The Future of the Album" commentary posted 2 August 07 (1) From December '04, when my review of the Laura Veirs CD Carbon Glacier appeared, to March '07, when I posted a review of Armchair Apocrypha, by Andrew Bird, there were 13 albums reviewed in all. That's about one every two-plus months, which, while not a terrible rate of regularity, always struck me as meager, considering all the albums that come out week to week. (Click to return to main commentary page.) (2) Apparently, the story goes that the 74 minutes length was set by a Sony executive who wanted CDs to be able to contain Beethoven's 9th Symphony on one disc. Sony and Philips had developed CD prototypes separately, but agreed to cooperate to bring one standard to the market. The prototype Philips came up with was 11.5 cm and would contain up to 60 minutes of music. Sony, however, required a 12-cm, 74-minute CD for the stated reason that it could fit Beethoven's 9th. As it turns out, few if any recorded performances of Beethoven's 9th are actually quite as long as 74 minutes, but this length would allow for a lot of variation. (Click to return to main commentary.) (3) Bonus tracks were a mixed blessing from the get-go. When it came to songs that were not originally on the album, one could often argue that they had been left off for a good reason. Even if one of the extra songs was good, it still wasn't part of the album and so stands apart in a way that breaks the experience of the album as originally conceived. The same would be true for alternate takes or live tracks. In this day of enhanced DVDs, featuring all sorts of extras, we're pretty used to the original versions of things not being sacred in any particular way. But I would argue that it's different with music than with movies. In movies, first of all, you far more often have things that were left out (for time constraints sometimes, and sometimes because of studio politics) that the director originally wanted in. I don't believe this is nearly as common with a record album. And more to my point of breaking the experience, with movies you usually have the extra material cordoned off in a separated place. You watch the movie first, you have the original movie experience, then you go to the menu and decide to deal with the extras. On CDs, bonus tracks come right after the album, usually without any separation of any kind. If you're not looking at the CD cover as you listen (and who does that?), you don't know where the album ends and where the extra stuff begins. Whether this is bad or good or indifferent, my point, again, is: the experience of the album has been changed, reflecting a different medium with different capabilities. (Click to return to main commentary.) (4) In the early days of bonus tracks, record companies sometimes took care to separate the original album from the extra songs with a bit of empty aural space, but it was never the standard and was soon rendered unnecessary, as people bought CDs with bonus tracks even when tacked on without care or concern that the original album had any particular artistic integrity. Maybe some releases still do this but it's definitely not the norm. (Click to return to main commentary.) (5) I really don't think we can underestimate the differences in the experience of listening to a vinyl LP versus listening to a CD, and I'm not even talking about the differences in sound. (That argument I'll leave to the audiophiles.) The vinyl LP, as noted, came in a larger, more alluring, more inherently tactile package. As an object it was not particularly portable, and the listening experience was completely not portable: you had to be in your house, or a friend's house, to listen. Not only that, but you were very likely in a comfortable place--a bedroom or a family room or an informal living room, lounging in a chair or a sofa or sprawled comfortably on the floor. If you were doing anything else while you were listening, you were doing it while sitting down--maybe reading, maybe homework, maybe a hobby of some sort. Those were really your basic options of how you listened. With CDs, you can be anywhere, doing anything else while you listen. How can this not have impacted how the music sounded? Or even how it was created? I still don't know song titles on some of my allegedly favorite CDs, but back in the vinyl days, of course I knew song titles. We were paying attention. (Click to return to main commentary.) (6) Originally, long-playing, 33 1/3 rpm vinyl records were developed in the 1930s to allow classical music fans--the mainstream music fans of the day--to hear the orchestral works of the masters without having to stop and flip and change records in the middle of one piece, which is how it unavoidably worked in the days of the 78 rpm and 45 rpm. Must've been really annoying, actually. Note how the CD's origin (see note 2, above) was also grounded in the realities of listening to classical music, not pop music. In any case, the widespread success of vinyl was delayed by World War II, which drastically interrupted vinyl production. (Click to return to main commentary.) (7) Note that I give Wilson more credit for Pet Sounds than I give the Beatles for Rubber Soul, in which he obviously heard something that I never have about that album's cohesiveness. Rubber Soul to me still sounds like a collection of songs. Great songs, to be sure. (The fact that there were two distinct versions--the 14-song British release had four songs the 12-song American release didn't have, while the American had two the British lacked--tells me it was still produced more in the song-collection vein than the album vein.) Oh, and Ray Davies of the Kinks should get more credit than he does in this story, for the album Face to Face, which came out in 1966. (Click to return to main commentary.) (8) I don't mean to imply every album produced during this period was a classic by any means. But by and large albums were created very much as albums through this time, for better or worse. And not only were all of them--except for the relatively rare double LP--52 minutes or less, the great majority were in the 40- to 50-minute range. Out of curiosity, I looked at the top 30 albums listed on the Rolling Stone list of top 500 albums ever (30 just because I wanted a sample but didn't want this to take all day, thank you). I removed compilations (there were three in the top 30) because they were not specifically recorded as albums, and added the next three on the list to keep things even. Even with four double albums in the top 30, the average album length was 46 minutes. Take out the double albums and the average time goes down to less than 42 minutes. (Click to return to main commentary.)