Does it seem like albums are getting longer? Boy, are they ever, at least some of them. Crazy long, like Chris Brown’s Heartbreak on a Full Moon, a 45-song album whose release was accompanied with a plea from him that laid out the calculus behind getting a hit these days.
It’s a bit bizarre, and surprising to those of us who aren’t music-industry bean-counters.Heartbreak isn’t even a double album, a concept that’s, well, doubly meaningless in 2017 — albums themselves barely exist in this era of streaming music. It’s all about individual songs and the number of times they’re played on internet or cellular streaming services to which listeners subscribe, like Apple Music or Google Play, or “freemium” platforms like Spotify.
In the pre-streaming days, of course, the math was simple for charting publications like industry institution Billboard magazine (What’s a magazine?): Their charts primarily reflected sales, with a little bit of radio-airplay mojo thrown in.
Now, though, few of us bother to actually buy songs when we can just listen stream them whenever and wherever. As a result, plays are a more meaningful measure of success for an artist attempting to persuade backers to finance the live performances at which today’s music stars actually make their money. The amount of money they get from each song played online is pitiful — services vary, but Google Play, for example, coughs up $0.0073 per stream. Outright album sales are so anemic that even music superstars like Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen can no longer live off their record sales. And thus the income model of the last few decades is flipped: Artists can’t get rich off recordings; instead, their hits serve simply as the exposure that makes a fan want to come out and pay for a pricey seat at a show.
If you’ve been a longtime observer of the music industry, this should ring a bell: It’s a return to the traditional business model of the 1950s and 1960s. Things have jumped backwards in another way, too. When tools like Apple’s Garageband app put a recording studio in everyone’s laptop, anyone can make a record — but once more, as in the 1950s, it’s promotion that brings a very small number up and out of the crowd and into listeners’ ears. Famous-for-being-famous…
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