[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.]<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>If I had a short attention span, I would listen to the radio. (Ok, I actually <i>do</i> have a short attention span, but well...)
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.<p>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!
The quote three lines in from Yorke is: <i>“None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again. Not straight off,”</i><p>which doesn't strike me as sharing the finality of the story's title.
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.
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.<p>Other threads around me point out the cons: albums are cornerstones of artists' careers, fantastic creative canvases, and so on.<p>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 <i>more</i> 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
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.<p>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.
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?
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).