Radiohead Says No More Albums

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/08/12/radiohead-says-no-more-albums/?mod=rss_WSJBlog

by jnorthrop • 17 years ago

60 27 17 years ago

blogs.wsj.com

dschobel• 17 years ago

The quote three lines in from Yorke is: “None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again. Not straight off,”

which doesn't strike me as sharing the finality of the story's title.

rms• 17 years ago

Right, the media always does this. They aren't going to come out with an album for the current release cycle. Next release cycle 5 years from now, sure.

jrschulz• 17 years ago

[Disclaimer: I am a big fan of Radiohead and at the same time listen to music almost exclusively album-for-album. No shuffle play for me, thanks.]

I seriously hope that they at least always release a couple of tracks together. Whether they call that an "album" doesn't matter to me.

I fail to imagine myself to buy a new song every couple of weeks and listen to each of them separately. Am I supposed to listen to new music for just four minutes and then skip to something else?

Complex, good music (which, for me, includes that of Radiohead) deserves attention. You cannot build up attention in such a short amount of time. An album is more tan a collection of songs. Every song not only stands for itself but also serves as a frame for all other songs.

If I had a short attention span, I would listen to the radio. (Ok, I actually do have a short attention span, but well...)

weaksauce• 17 years ago

From the article Thom says they are going to release single songs and EP's

tdm911• 17 years ago

I couldn't agree with you anymore. I fit your description perfectly too. Albums are a group of songs put together for a reason. They flow, have beginnings and endings. The progression of songs tells a story, it makes sense. I would hate to see this disappear.

I guess I should note that this isn't true for all artists, but for artists like Radiohead, buying a single off one of their albums would only tell a small part of a grand story.

I guess I always knew the day would come where Radiohead stop producing albums, I had just hoped it would be a lot further away.

tetha• 17 years ago

In case you need examples to back up your view of albums, take a look at Adversus' or Eisregens early albums, for example. Adversus' albums are like a depressing hour-long story of a sad love. Eisregen had some really nice 4-song-cycles (FF - like "color darkness" about an evil darkness from the underworld, wiping out humanity, and the Pest-zyklus - like "pestilence cycle", which is a sad, rough tale about abuse of people during the time of pestilence, people going crazy and such.).

But I guess such albums are too complicated for todays everyday market and will stay rare. :(

pmorici• 17 years ago

Many of Charles Dickens's books were originally released one chapter at a time just because Radiohead releases songs as singletons doesn't mean you can't put them together to make something greater than the parts.

jerf• 17 years ago

That's not the question; the question is whether those parts will form a greater whole.

I'm not the original poster, so I speak only for myself. Some of my "albums" (read: CDs) are just collections of songs, and that's fine. But some of the albums have coherency, stylistic similarities that don't just come from the artist (as other albums from the same artist will have different stylistic similarities in those songs), and other things that make these albums a bit more than just the sum of their parts. This doesn't just include the "concept albums", but even things that may sound like "just a collection of songs" at first but turn out to have a flow and coherency once you think about it.

If nothing else, there's an art to album arrangement. Like good editing, it might be easier to see if I gave an example of a very degenerate case than if I try to say what's good: If you release 6 happy songs and 6 sad songs, you don't want them to show up in that order, as that makes for a terrible break in the flow (it'll feel like two albums glued together); you want to mix them together, and even with the same 12 songs, the tone of the album can be somewhat manipulated just by the order of the songs. (Start and end on happy? Start and end on sad? etc.)

It's not just a matter of "my choice"; there's a matter of the artist's choice as well. This is a very fuzzy thing and it is perfectly possible to create a "mix album" with a bit of work that is itself a bit more than the sum of its parts, but there's still something to be said for an artist doing this deliberately.

(Besides, call me old-fashioned but I think that there's still a place for the concept album. The short form gets mined out easily, especially in the context of a single artist; giving a bigger canvas to a skilled artist can produce something genuinely different.)

I hope that people continue to produce albums and not just single, isolated tracks. (Of course, albums too could be serialized. And maybe that's all you meant, but I still wanted to point out this could be a problem in this bright new era. I'm not prone to complaining about new media but this is one place we could genuinely lose an entire art form, not just be quibbling about the smell of the book or something else that nobody under the age of 10 will ever miss in the future (my personal metric of fuddy-duddy-ness when it comes to complaining about new media).)

freetard• 17 years ago

> Am I supposed to listen to new music for just four minutes and then skip to something else?

So I guess Chopin's Minute Waltz is not for you.

notirk• 17 years ago

I have been thinking for a while that it was only a matter of time until bands started moving towards recording and publishing a fewer number of songs at a time due to digital sales. Albums make sense when you have to press a physical medium and distribute it across the country/world, not so much with a purely digital distribution.

The making of individual tracks also works well with pop music and its mentality, actually, it makes tons of sense, cutting costs by only writing and recording a few songs and spoon feeding it to the radio stations and the general public. The move away from albums is a total shame from an artistic view point. You'd never end up with masterpiece albums like "Dark Side of the Moon" with bands recording a few tracks at a time. I also connect so much of a band and their era's by albums too. Metallica and their change with the black album and everything after that. Even when I download new music today, I acquire full albums to hear everything else the band has made. I'm not looking forward to the day it's mostly individual tracks!

mrshoe• 17 years ago

Radiohead has proven to be ahead of the curve in the music industry, yet frankly I'm surprised to see this coming from a "real band" first.

Pop artists generally pay big name producers for 2 to 3 tracks per album, which they plan on releasing as singles. The rest of the tracks are more or less filler so they can justify charging $15 for a long play album.

With digital distribution becoming more popular and consumers buying more singles instead of full albums, I thought pop artists would be the first to stop releasing full-length albums. I guess this is just another example of the music industry being unable or unwilling to adapt to the changing landscape.

I really do hope, though, as you mentioned, that real musicians continue to put in the creativity and hard work it takes to produce full albums. The result is just far better than a collection of singles.

koepked• 17 years ago

I agree with you much on how much this makes sense for music as a business. I don't lament the death of the album though, because I don't think this will be the death of the album, this will be a filter. Many albums today are no more than a list of potentially hit singles for the "artist". If the industry heads in the direction inticated by the article, I'd bet that entire albums would still be released, but only when it made artistic sense to do so.

rokhayakebe• 17 years ago

Agile Album Development.

sgoranson• 17 years ago

That kinda bums me out to hear. I know Radiohead's m.o. lately is revolutionizing the process of music production, and maybe they think albums are a relic of the old regime and passe or something. But can you really imagine if OK Computer was released one iTunes download at a time? yuck.

jpwagner• 17 years ago

OK Computer moreso than Kid A.

From stuff he says, sounds like he may be a bit out of gas...

SwellJoe• 17 years ago

The Bends (which, I've always felt is their best album overall) would work pretty well in a singles model, though it is even better taken as a whole.

I think it's worth realizing that the "album" concept came about because of technological changes...and the singles model is coming back, again, because of technology. I also don't think most songwriters can really deliver an album, in the grand sense of the word. I think the list of truly great whole albums is shockingly short. There are only a few people on earth that can deliver an album of the caliber of Dark Side of the Moon, Abbey Road, Rumors, London Calling, etc. Most of even the best selling bands of all time would have served their customers better by providing a few great singles at a fair price. Journey, for example. Great bunch of very successful singles over a long career...but even their best album is at least half filler, and none of their albums are better appreciated as a whole (Don't Stop Believing is not improved by being heard with the surrounding tracks on Escape).

Bands that want to make long cohesive concept pieces are more free than ever to do so; the cost of album production is lower than ever, and the distribution costs have reached approximately zero. Their customers are also more free than ever to say, "$12 for 15 songs is too steep. But I'll give you a buck each for those two really good songs." The casual listener has a chance to take part and support artists in ways they may not have in the past, while the artist and dedicated fans can still choose big productions and long-form recordings (and pay more for that experience).

These are good times for music, both artists and fans. The recording industry, on the other hand, is approaching a long-deserved reckoning.

dzlobin• 17 years ago

I've got to come clean, I feel like I'm the only person who never enjoyed radiohead. I like a grand total of two songs.

ars• 17 years ago

Don't feel bad - I've never even heard of them.

greendestiny• 17 years ago

Yeah just as a complete aside, and not a judgement on the band or its fans, but I feel like I no matter how many times I've heard songs from "Ok, Computer" I couldn't pick it from elevator music.

mynameishere• 17 years ago

Me too. Here's the one I like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssWkw26YQF0

Anyway, singles bare no comparison to albums. A good album is 1000 times better than a good single. Imagine any single track off DSOTM versus any particular song off of it.

edb• 17 years ago

Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, and I have respect for yours. That being said, the idea of anyone not being able to enjoy radiohead makes me sad. Give them another try! :)

robryan• 17 years ago

Maybe the reason album sales are out of line with singles in growth/ decline because bands are cutting corners and releasing albums with a couple of good songs and a load of average stuff just to get to album size.

Given the relative low payoff from making an album these days I think some bands would be better served making new music bit by bit between tours rather than trying to push out an album every year. It usually gets to the point with a good band after about 2 or 3 albums that they don't have time to play everything you want to hear at a concert anyway so slower production of songs isn't an issue in that reguard.

beamso• 17 years ago

Billy Corgan has said the same thing about upcoming Smashing Pumpkins releases. Only singles and EPs after Zeitgeist (hence American Gothic and G.L.O.W).

joebottherobot• 17 years ago

It was really sad to hear this. Radiohead albums tend to be greater than the sum of their individual tracks.

H__N• 17 years ago

Try Gustav Mahler's Symphony No 9 if you like long complex music. 4 parts 30 min 16 min 14 min and the forth at 28 min. The Adagio is good.

tamas• 17 years ago

Interestingly, they announced this after releasing an album on the Internet. Nine Inch Nails also announced their farewell tour after doing online release[s] (1 regular album, and a 4 CD instrumental, collaborative set). Maybe it's a sign of really getting tired of the "music business" when a well established band starts doing online releases?

flipbrad• 17 years ago

A bit like 'pay what you want' - this is a band that has the prior cred and prior revenue to experiment pretty much however they damn well please.

Other threads around me point out the cons: albums are cornerstones of artists' careers, fantastic creative canvases, and so on.

But in a future when we're streaming, not owning, our music, and where the album is already dead (unpackaged by iTunes), there is arguably a future where music is released as a steady, no-rush stream of quality tracks that then get remixed and mashed up by listeners, and placed into the totally unique and possibly more meaningful context of the user's own playlists ("albums"). Like fanfic circulating around publishing, people will put together and share suggested album-like playlists anyway, perhaps even giving them their own 'album titles'. Wisdom of the crowd principle suggests these might be even better ordered and contextualised and thus increase the popularity of the tracks within to broadened audience, driving 'airplay' and perhaps ownership

Radiohead Says No More Albums

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