Is The Album Dead?
Like many of you, I don’t quite buy as many albums as I used. In last six months, there are two albums — Bombay Dub Orchestra’s 3 Cities and Federico Aubele’s Amatoria — that made the cut for me and merited the full download. I fully agreed with Mark Cuban, who declared that the album was dead. He correctly pointed out that iTunes had changed our buying habits – we now buy singles. “Why don’t artists serialize the release of songs ? Why not create a “season” of release of songs, much like the fall TV season,” he wrote. Great idea.
Today when my friend Ethan Diamond, founder of BandCamp (Disclosure: a music start-up that is funded by True Ventures, where I am a Venture Partner) posted his defense, arguing that the album is not dead. At least not in the indie-music circles, the kind of people who often use