When will the album format in prog go away?

Yes but. ;-)

TeleStrat wrote: Good morning HackettFan When I say industry I mean the people (producers, labels, etc) who decide what music gets made and released in the first place. I'm sure they are well aware of the fact that a lot of people download for free or pay $1.50 for one song instead of twelve or fourteen bucks for a complete CD. When they see changes in the consumers' buying habits the will adjust accordingly. They are, and always have been, in the business to make money. Key words here are consumers' buying habits.

Good morning to you too. I still don't understand why they would be adjusting to free. Zero is zero no matter how many times you multiply it. The extent to which the music industry is adjusting in that fashion has nothing to do with the consumers you're referring to, because they get nothing from them. The reason they're moving in the direction you've referred to is because they are at the mercy of the directions in the tech industry.

Edited by HackettFan - January 31 2015 at 11:52

I think an aspect previously missed is that prog is a music genre that put the album format to its own uses by coming up with concept albums.

The long-play record was invented for the sake of classical music - to have a medium where an entire symphony movement fits on one side of a record, such that you could have a whole 4-movement symphony in a two-record package without any interruptions in the flow of music other than the intermissions between the movements.

Rock music, in contrast, began as (and to the major part still is) a genre of music using the format of the 45 RPM single (which in turn "inherited" its playing time from the 78 RPM schellac record), and albums, as has been said here, were (and often still are) just collections of 8 to 12 (or more, e.g. in punk rock, where many songs are shorter than 2 minutes, such that 20 or more fit on a single album) songs.  The first rock albums were what are now termed compilations - collections of songs that had been previuously published (as singles), and recorded at different times.  And that is why they are named albums.

Only in the mid-60s, albums became the primary publishing format of rock music, as they are today.  This was when bands began to view the album as something more than just a collection of independent songs.  Opinions differ, of course, which album was the first concept album - it is not really possible to draw a line: how much musical or textual coherence is necessary to make an album a "concept album"?

(And then there are concept bands, where all albums tell a contiguous story, such as Magma, Coheed & Cambria and - to a lesser degree - Ayreon.)

As long as progressive rock musicians will conceive works of music in which a length of 40, 60 or more minutes constitutes a single work they will find ways of disseminating it in some sort of package, whatever the actual sound carrier will look like.



Edited by WeepingElf - January 31 2015 at 13:40

Progosopher wrote: Here is another way to look at the issue, or problem if you will:  In this era of niche marketing, there is a market for the album format and that, my friends, includes us as proggers.  As long as such markets exist, there will be purveyors seeking to fill those niches.  They may not become millionaires doing so, but you never know.  The fact that there are a lot of new prog releases show that somebody is more interested in well-developed music than the usual 3 1/2 - 5 minute pap that passes for popular music, and more and more of those are going independent.

But will the software and hardware developers support the niche? They have no reason to, that I'm aware of.

Edited by HackettFan - January 31 2015 at 17:02

Get off yer butts and make yer own prog! 

WeepingElf wrote: As long as progressive rock musicians will conceive works of music in which a length of 40, 60 or more minutes constitutes a single work they will find ways of disseminating it in some sort of package, whatever the actual sound carrier will look like.

^ Ain't vinyl great?

Totally off topic, but 

Edited by Davesax1965 - February 01 2015 at 05:10

Popular music has always been dominated by the single song format, modern technology has not changed anything. For most artists the album was merely an anthology of single songs and then often only as a vehicle for re-selling the hit single once it dropped from the chart. As the idea of the album as a stand-a-lone product emerged in the late 60s the single was used as a radio-friendly promotion item, but still the single format dominated the public image of an artist. For example, Jethro Tull is remembered by many people only for the single Living In The Past, not for the album Stand Up that was released at the time. Similarly The Moody Blues are remembered for chart-topping singles such as Nights In White Satin and Question, not for Days of Future Past and A Question Of Balance those singles were taken from.

The thing that puzzles me over all these kinds of debates is why the whole music buying population gets tarred with the same sticky brush. We are not all the same, we do not all behave in the same way. There is a broad spectrum of music buyers who are buying vinyl, these range from Jazz and Classical aficionados to Hipsters and all ports in between - Prog fans are a small percentage of that. The same is true of those who download and those who stick to buying their albums on CD. Prog will never be a mainstream genre (not that it ever really was anyway), the people who would be put off by long compositions and album-length concepts have always been in the majority regardless of the mores of modern technology and lifestyle, they didn't buy Prog in the 70s and they wouldn't buy it now.