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Death of An Album - The Hip Hop Stimulus Plan by DJ Explosive
This was a great article that was sent to me by DJ Explosive. It’s posted on his blog.
Written by Xplosive.
Tags: dead, death of, Detox, DJ, Dr Dre, hip hop, package, plan, rap, stimulus, xplosive
Last week I mentioned that I was hesitant to write a complete eulogy for the packaged collection of recordings we’ve come to know as an album. Well, I’ve reconsidered. Here it is.
The album is dead. At least in hip-hop this is the case and, from what I hear, the same is true for other genres. So that Detox album you’ve been holding your breath for - forget about Dre. Blueprint 3? Move it from TBD to RIP. And for all the new signees that keep talking about their debut albums, they need to adjust their marketing and acknowledge the mixtapes are as close to an album as they are going to get.
The demise and death of the album should not surprise anyone. We’ve all done our part to deconstruct the machine that made this sort of packaging sell and we did it for a reason.
Personally, I’m not sad to see the album go. I believe a lot of us have this romantic idea of a classic album that can be listened to cover-to-cover, and that leads us to overvalue the concept as a whole. For every Illmatic, The Chronic or College Dropout CD that you purchased how many albums weren’t classics? I’m guessing a lot. If you’re like the majority of us whose purchases made the music business one of the strongest forces in entertainment, you probably spent a lot of money on a lot of CDs that had 1-2 songs you actually wanted to hear.
When Napster came along, Shawn Fanning became a hero for those of us with towers full of CDs gathering dust. He opened the gate to a world we didn’t know existed by giving us the freedom to pick and choose the songs we wanted and the ability to stop wasting money on things we didn’t need. Some say he killed the music industry; I say he saved the consumer.
