1.
The other day I saw a tweet by the man who still calls himself-- and why not? He founded it-- MySpace Tom. It was a reply, explaining that he was not on Twitter much; he prefers to use Facebook. Cue much ironic reposting. My day job involves thinking about social networks, and when I started it back in 2008 one of the first things I gleaned from the blogosphere was that MySpace was dead. So was Yahoo. AOL, too. The casualties mounted, month on month, not just sites but whole activities. Blogging is dead. Email is dead. The web is dead.
Of course for a music fan this high mortality rate was comfortingly familiar. As an NME reader I'd waded hip-deep in the gore of slaughtered genres. Music criticism was a zombie apocalypse: I'd seen punk, rock, hip-hop, and dance music all breathe their last then stagger back up again. Once I started writing about music I gleefully took up arms myself, joining in with a host of commentators predicting the "death of the album." And the album sensibly ignored me.
Glib pronouncements that something or other is "dead" are excitable and annoying, but that doesn't make them meaningless. The main sin is one of degree: Nobody would claim MySpace is in good health, but most cultural deaths happen sadly and slowly. With over 40 million monthly US visitors the site plainly has a few years left in it, but at the same time it's very difficult to find anyone willing to bet on its returning to anything like its former prominence. So proclaimed cultural death is a combination of measurable decline and a more intangible sense of future irrelevance.
Take rock, for instance, whose latest bout of mortality was based on the grim factoid that the only hit "rock song" last year was Train's "Hey, Soul Sister": a datapoint spun out by commentators into a terminal prognosis. "Rock is dead" doesn't just mean "Fewer people listen to rock," though. It might also include the idea of "nobody important listens to rock" or "people listen to rock, but it's not interesting music anymore" (hardly unfair in Train's case). These implied value judgments feel a lot more arguable than the MySpace example, but the main difference is that in tech criticism the pronouncements hide behind the data-- if the more than 40 million remaining MySpace visitors were all high-income executives, its decline would be described very differently.
It's rare for these judgments to be made from inside a thing-- rock fans don't say, "You know, you're right. Rock is dead, but I still love it." Which raises an interesting idea-- how would we know, from the inside, that something was dead? What does cultural death feel like for the people still enjoying the moribund thing?
One of the most memorable depictions of the subjectivity of death is Philip K. Dick's Ubik, a science fiction novel in which the dead, near-dead, or living status of the protagonists is constantly under question. The hero, Joe Chip, is caught in an explosion, which he gradually becomes aware he may not have survived: His body and consciousness are preserved in "half-life," a suspended animation state he perceives as a reality subject to sudden and extreme decay. Milk sours, friends age to death, objects regress to older versions of themselves.
I found the terrifying limbo of Ubik helpful as a way of thinking about cultural death. It struck me that we experience cultural death-- of a music genre, say-- as a shrinking reality bubble. Within the bubble we listen to what we always did, we talk to people who listen to that stuff too, we enjoy the unspoken shared experience. But outside the bubble that experience is irrelevant or forgotten. And like the eerie decay phenomena in Joe Chip's reality, conditions inside the bubble can deteriorate rapidly. Radio stations change format away from your music to something else; mailing lists sputter out; fellow fans move away and are not replaced.
2.
If I was certain of one thing 10 years ago, it was that the album format was finished. I wasn't alone in this-- it was a pretty common prediction in the days of Napster and Audiogalaxy. Some of my reasons for predicting the death of the album were plain dumb-- I remember confidently stating that the time it took to download full LPs would put people off-- but others seemed a lot sounder. The main argument ran as follows: Albums are tied to physical formats that the Internet lets us unbundle. This flexibility means that the individual track becomes the primary unit of music, while album sales collapse.
This analysis is familiar, obvious, and it mostly came true. Sales analyses last month revealed that in 2009 American consumers bought less than one album per head-- an all-time low. As for singles, which historically have never been above one sale per capita since the early 70s, digital downloads meant they were selling at more than four times that. When you turn away from purchase habits and towards streamed, pirated, and free music-- where accurate figures are hard to come by-- it's a fair hypothesis that the world of torrented albums is dwarfed by the scale of single-track YouTube views.
In other words, the exact shift people predicted took place: album sales tanked, and singles sales boomed. But it doesn't really feel that way-- as a cultural unit, a way to measure musical achievement, the album survived and now seems stronger than ever. If anything, the last 10 years have seen a concentration of critical attention around genres where albums are traditionally important-- indie rock, for instance. It doesn't hurt that the decline of LP sales now means indie rock acts chart a lot higher than they used to.
So what happened? How come pundits like me were simultaneously so right and so wrong about the fate of the album format? It's because the bet on the death of the album was based on a false assumption. I assumed that the two components of cultural death-- measurable decline and perceived irrelevance-- moved in step, that the former would trigger the latter. And so the way we talk about pop culture would change in line with our behavior around it-- a new way of talking about and relating to music would emerge in a market dominated by shared single songs.
And that's the part that didn't come off: The album as an idea is too baked into every element of music fandom and marketing, from the promotional cycle to the end-of-year critical rituals. Instead we have a situation very like the hypothetical MySpace one I outlined, where the remaining listeners see themselves as an elite, not a rump. This has been helped by the fact that the singles boom has failed to offset the record industry's loss of income from plummeting CD sales, so the story of the shift back to single tracks gets subsumed in a wider "death" story, about the record business in general.
So right now we seem to be in a weird place as music fans. On one side pop music is becoming a medium based on singles and individual views and plays. On the other, this shift in public behavior hasn't paid off commercially yet, and so an associated cultural move hasn't happened. It seems to me that one result is a widening disconnect between the album world and the singles world-- assorted complaints about the manufacture of pop, the sexualization of pop, the rise of Auto-Tune and Eurodance beats and YouTube rap and whatever else, all snowballing into a mindset which sees the "mainstream" not simply as crass or diluted but as something fundamentally illegitimate and unreal. As a lifelong fan of the fertile crossovers and interzones between mainstream and underground, perhaps I'm prone to worry too much about this. But the gap between the album's cultural and commercial fates makes me feel that one side is in a half-life bubble. The question is which.
