Splicetoday

Music
Aug 28, 2008, 11:35AM

iTunes Backlash

Over the past year artists like Kid Rock, AC/DC, and Jay-Z have refused to make their music available on iTunes because they felt the popular Apple distributor encouraged singles instead of cohesive albums. They've had moderate commercial success, leading some record companies to think the era of the album isn't quite dead yet.

Kid Rock's success sans iTunes apparently prompted Atlantic Records, owned by Warner Music Group, to pull an album by R&B artist Estelle from iTunes, too (Estelle's album remains on Amazon's MP3 store, but is sold "album-only").

AC/DC has never put its music on iTunes either, the WSJ points out, and still managed to enjoy some success with 2.7 million CD sales last year.

And, of course, Jay-Z made headlines late last year for boycotting iTunes when his new album (at the time) American Gangster went on sale. "As movies are not sold scene by scene, this collection will not be sold as individual singles," he said at the time. The one thing we'll likely never know, though, is how much more successful these artists would be with the help of iTunes, if at all.

These artists' complaints aren't so much iTunes' fault as they are the "fault" of the evolving music market. There's an endless supply of other music stores that also sell music on a track-by-track basis, because customers just plain love being able to cherry-pick their favorite songs. Digital downloads just make that easier, but the practice itself has been around for decades.

Discussion
  • Sounds good to me. The album as an experience is very important to me, and stuff like this makes me hopeful that we'll see an era in the future where digital downloads and full albums as opposed to single songs will be the default. Certain bands lend themselves to singles rather than LP's, but the vast majority of remarkable bands make records that are meant to be listened to all the way through, or at least owned that way.

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