The Idea Blog

Jason Fry collects some of the recent wisdom about album or cd sales in his Beyond the Album from The Wall Street Journal.

iTunes has freed me from buying the entire cd when all I want may be a single cut. This has been especially helpful when I’m wanting a song - a single song - that I remember from an earlier era. “Did you ever have to make up your mind,” for instance, from the Lovin’ Spoonful. There may be six cuts those guys did that I might want to hear, but certainly not the 20 or so on the Rhino retrospective.

Anyway, Fry points us to some of the latest thinking about where music is going, and one of the more interesting ideas comes from Mark Cuban (cited in Fry’s article), who suggests that artists serialize their albums, maybe one song per month for a year.

Seems to be a classic re-take, a retro, a nod to Dickens, Twain and other 19th Century writers who serialized many of their best fictions, one chapter at a time.

Imagine: Sgt. Pepper, dribbling out one or two cuts at a time. Or, more to the current era, Radiohead’s In Rainbows.

I like the idea.