http://is.gd/rCJM

A writer at The Guardian has taken a couple of 1's and added them up to make 967.

That's what columnists are supposed to do, isn't it? I think online newspapers, especially The Guardian, determine the success of a columnist's piece by the amount of feedback it generates. It then becomes incumbent on the writer to polarise opinions, because where there are polarised opinions, 100's of comments are bound to follow.

Which is great for the advertisers.

So, MTV ran a poll to find out what The Best Album Released Since 1981 is, the year --- of course -- that MTV killed the radio star.

Quite why anyone would regard MTV's audience as arbiters of taste / quality or shifts in cultural tectonics I don't know. Another case of journalists cannabalising themselves... with me here right at the end of the foodchain blogging up the gacky leftovers.

Seems that two pieces of evidence point to the imminent death of the album: you only need to sell 60,000 copies of one to get to No. 1 in the U.S. and Craig David got voted into 2nd place on this hallowed list of Best Albums Ever [oh, since 1981].

The second statistic [the Craig David one... sorry I'm sleep hollow with lame horse brain] says a lot more about MTV's audience than it does album sales.

I suppose that the former statistic is a surprise. I don't know what to compare it to, though. 60,000 seems like quite a lot to me. I wouldn't want to have to hand deliver them.

Even younger music commentators appear to feel compelled to compare album / CD sales to an alleged golden age of sales [generally the mid 70's or, in this article, the year 2000], as if this is an absolute indicator of a format's success.

But there are two types of success, aren't there?

Commercial success: where such figures do count, and

Artistic success: where the figures shouldn't count, at all.

Apparently, the other threat to the album as an artistic form, is the .mp3.

Of course it is.

We'll discount the fact that only 10%-ish [it might be 6%, but I don't want to exaggerate] of music sales are downloads.

But more arbitrarily, who has done the market research that substantiates the connection between individual .mp3 sales threatening the album as a format?

Just because the 10% of us who download some of our music have a 'Shuffle' function doesn't mean that we're using it all the time. Doesn't mean that we don't know how to turn it off if we want to appreciate an album as a whole. Doesn't mean we're magpie philistines who can't absorb and enjoy more than 3 minutes of our favourite artists' music at any one time.

It does mean [my leap, this one] that there are more people casually dipping into albums than before -- buying a track from an album, or just the hit singles, rather than the whole thing.

But that has always happened.

Always.

And when people were using listening booths or record shops [hell, even radio shows] to check out albums in the past, the artists weren't getting *any* revenue from the process.

This mode of thinking also recycles and perpetuates the myth that people who listened to actual vinyl albums listened to them all the way through. I accept that the format might have made golden age music love-in people more inclined to listen to a whole side -- but I remember skipping through albums using the universal technology of my hand moving the needle thirty years before the .mp3 shuffle function.

I'm not a music journalist [clearly] but the standard of some music journalism beggars my belief -- and I'm generally inclined to believe anything.

We all have to keep a roof over our heads, and I've been guilty of some bullshit hypothesising myself, but please stop this endless cycle of 'x' format is 'dead'-type articles.

The album will survive because, in essence, an album is nothing more than a collection of songs, and that is always going to be a viable option for artists constructing their musical vision.

If the vision is compelling there will be an audience for it, in its entirety, or piecemeal. It is no different to how it was been since the dawn of the L.P.

We can't uninvent the album, or the concept of having more than one piece of music thematically / conceptually-linked to another.

The album isn't dead.

But isn't it time to take this type of article to the abattoir?

[Doolittle would have got my vote, by the way -- and I've just noticed it *is* actually in that list. Heck.] Back to the top of the page...