“We don’t make singles – we make albums” was the war-cry ACDC guitarist Angus Young used eighteen months ago to slam iTunes for not making their record Black Ice an album-only download. Now Pink Floyd are the latest group to bemoan the pick-and-choose culture of iTunes in a victorious court battle to block iTunes from selling their songs individually, rather than as a full album. The move could see the band’s entire discography being pulled from iTunes.
Apple see it as allowing customers to select their favourite songs from artists and avoid paying for songs that they neither want nor need, whereas Floyd consider the traditional ideals of a record as inviolable – if Apple get their own way it means you’re not just paying for one song, but only three minutes of an entire artistic piece.
An album is a time capsule that holds the tendencies of an artist at the time, as well as the social factors surrounding it.
Would you skip thirty minutes into a film, watch ten minutes and then turn it off? Look at half a painting? Only buying Money on Dark Side of the Moon and not listening to it in its entirety is comparable to shredding up a Picasso and only admiring an inch of the work.
No-one said music is supposed to be easy, but the cyberpunk generation we live in is forcing it to be. Music artists slave over creating a piece of auditory art for months and sometimes years for the desire to delight and inspire their fans. However in this day-and-age, this is completely futile when an iTunes user is privy to over six million different songs, all available for individual download within seconds. A lot of people simply haven’t got the patience to let an album grow on them.
Records were once as precious as holy relics. Playing the album for the first time was and still can be a true event – pressing ‘Play’ and waiting for the first bar of music, inspecting the covers, breathing in what the artist wants to show you while you go down the rabbit-hole further by looking at inlays and lyrics. An album is a time capsule that holds the tendencies of an artist at the time, as well as the social factors surrounding it.
iTunes is a fantastic tool to tap into new and old music alike, but it is also the Grim Reaper, Black Death and Kamikaze Bomber all rolled into one for full albums. Everything on iTunes shouldn’t be album-only, but it should be to the artist’s discretion. Thankfully the public appear to be seeing the light – the biggest-selling back catalogue acts in the world? The Beatles and ACDC – neither of which, are available on iTunes. Viva la Revolution!