Albums

Don't confuse your core audience with the public at large.

If you're happy speaking to a small cadre of folks, by all means make an album every two or three years which will speak to your tiny audience. But if you want to be ubiquitous, if you want to be rich, if you want to be known...

An album has nothing to do with it.

Most people are casual listeners who go deep on an occasional act. Do they need to go deep via an album? When every streaming service lists the most popular tracks you've cut? Of course not.

You're hanging with other musicians. You grew up at the record store. You reminisce about the days of yore, spinning "After The Gold Rush" or "Thriller" incessantly. But that was back when music was scarce and the album was all you could afford. When we all tuned into the same radio stations and MTV and were banged over the head with the same stuff. To say things are different now is an understatement, in the pre-Internet era the only way I could reach you with this missive was via snail mail, which was expensive, and I couldn't even find you.

First and foremost you're an artist, hewing to your own vision.

But then you survive on your audience.

If anybody tells you they're satisfied with a small audience, ignore them. They're afraid. Of the Internet feedback, of the hate, of the rejection. That's what comes with success, your old friends get jealous and abandon you and your initial fans reject you and you feel lonely and...

But that's what music stardom is, that's what you should sign up for.

So think of your career through the public's eye. People are overloaded with information, they've only got time for great, and they salivate for more and more on a regular basis.

Imagine if you could only speak with your girlfriend once a year. Via twelve letters written over the course of twelve months. With no feedback in between. Would that be satisfying? OF COURSE NOT!

But you want to text all day and Skype all night.

Why should art be any different?

You want to ride right alongside your listeners. You want to be in their consciousness 24/7. Most albums don't sustain, just look at the sales chart for edification, they enter high and go right down. But a few sustain, not because the tracks are put in album form, but people want more.

Labels want albums, it's easier to charge a lot with the bundle.

Artists want albums, because they grew up on them and they want to emulate their heroes and make a statement.

But the album is meaningless to the listener who's been brought up on the iPod which was just killed and replaced with flash memory in a phone. The fan wants access. Everything you think is relevant may not be. Like that inane Apple leak about a new album format. People don't want to own, they want access.

But fans are insatiable. Connect and they want more and more. Not only the studio takes, but the alternative takes, the live takes, the covers. Don't think of albums as a profit center so much as the glue that holds your career together. You'll get paid by a streaming service, quite handsomely eventually. But the goal is to utilize your recordings and the bond they engender to create and execute in other arenas and platforms.

He who hews to the past is destined for the scrapheap.

Or irrelevancy.


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