CD sales are dying. No, really dying. In 2007 48% of teenagers bought no physical CDs at all. That’s up from 38% the year before. What does this say about the future of music? Well, it is definitely moving more and more to a singles driven economy. The concept of, well, a concept album just isn’t hip anymore. Kids want the hits and only the hits. There’s, of course, some logic to such thinking. Who wants to pay retail for a CD with only one good song when you can pay for only that one song via download? It saves you as the consumer money, plus it doesn’t weigh down your music collection with a lot of unwanted filler tracks.
Except, those filler tracks sometimes have a way of revealing themselves to be much more. Usually track 11 isn’t going to be much to write home about, but there are those times. Sometimes an artist’s biggest hit is the song they never wanted to include on an album, and it can often be discovered first by fans and not record executives deciding what to release as a single next. This new economy of music doesn’t rule out such discoveries, but it certainly makes them all the more difficult. Is that really what the music industry needs?
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