Barth

Agreed. Even bands from back in the day seem to be guilty of releasing a couple good songs on an album and calling it a day.
For instance, Bon Jovi, in their Slippery When Wet/New Jersey days were releasing albums that were good top to bottom. Now they release an album and your lucky to get one or two good songs.
Alanis Morissette has been guilty of the same thing over her last several albums. She probably could have divided up 3 songs each off of JLP over three different albums and had three no.1 cds.
I think that iTunes might have killed some of the drive and creativity these artists have to put out a complete album.

bunkaroo

Add to that, artists are expected to keep churning out material at a fast pace to keep the gravy train rolling. Personally I'd rather have a release every 4-5 years from an artist if it meant higher quality throughout the entire album than rushing stuff out every 1-2 years. That said, some artists are capable of producing that much good material that often. But I think that's probably the exception.

orangecrush

I recently went back and listened to the Beatles catalog a few times. I don't like the Beatles as much as a lot of other people, but the sheer amount of quality music they created in less than 10 years is remarkable.

spainlinx0

I still haven't purchased a song off Itunes. I basically do all my listening through Spotify, and every now and then I'll buy something from Amazon.

Hokeyboy

I do. Every single one of them. This fallacy that you "lose access" to your iTunes purchases is laughable.

That said, I haven't bought anything off iTunes in about 4-5 years. Mostly because I loathe the lossy format, and I loathe the iTunes software even more. Bloated, memory-leaky garbage. If it's digital, I run FLACs through Media Monkey and I also touch the

bunkaroo

I suspect a lot of that had to do with them having the financial support of the label to actually spend time experimenting and honing their songs.

So many of our all-time great artists took several albums to find their stride, and artists of today can't do that when they have no financial support or are being forced to get something to #1 RIGHT NOW.

Supermallet

Actually, The Beatles had just as much pressure to create #1 hits as anyone else, possibly more, because of the breackneck pace at which they worked. And they didn't begin really experimenting until they stopped touring.

Most bands aren't expected to have a record out every year anymore. The Beatles, The Stones, The Kinks, etc. were under much more pressure than most bands are today.

bunkaroo

Maybe the Beatles are a bad example then, but you can't deny the average major-label signed band in say the 70's was given a lot more time and money to develop than today. It took Rush four records to have something considered successful for instance.

Why So Blu?

Back in the day, bands cranked out album after album, etc... Kiss released their debut in early '74 and their followup, Hotter Than Hell, in late '74. Their 3rd album, Dressed to Kill, in '75, and then their live album, Alive, also in '75. They became hot after Alive's release. Three studio and one live album(s) later. Fuck, all that in the span of 2 years or so.

They even released Destroyer and Rock N Roll Over, both in '76, and then became superstars. From early 1974 to late 1976. Not a bad time frame whatsoever. They busted their asses.

Yeah, the labels did have money to invest in the bands for studio albums, but they also had more money to finance the tours and have the bands go out and perform.

bunkaroo

I'm not sure if this was the case for a lot of bands, but I seem to recall Yes saying they used to break-in new material on the road, so by the time the tour was over, they'd just go record it quickly since it was already well-rehearsed, and then get back on the road. In Kiss' case, it' snot like there stuff was very complex. Catchy, sure. But I doubt it took them very long to come up with an album's worth of songs.

Supermallet

Even Yes was releasing an album every year. The Yes Album was 1971, Fragile 1972, Close To The Edge 1973, etc. They released an album a year from 1968 to 1980.

Why So Blu?

The touring though, is what was the major factor of generating revenue. I know during some of the more high profile albums of theirs most of the band didn't even record together and had session cats come in and do the parts. They used the art of leverage to their advantage. Some bands wouldn't have done that. This let them focus on the bigger picture, which ended up being licensing.

Tarantino

It's accessible, catchy pop music. Who gives a shit who it panders to? If you don't like it, don't listen to it. Just so much bitching about it online, it's hilarious.

bunkaroo

There's nothing wrong with accessible catchy pop music - that song is just shit. Period. Much better pop music out there.

Barth

Exactly. I'm older so some might not remember, but there was the big uproar that it was taking Def Leppard so long to make a follow up to Pyromania (ended up being 4 years). We all know how well Hysteria did.
If anything, give me a solid album every few years instead of a couple good songs out of 10 one year, a couple more out of 10 the next and so on.

Hokeyboy

I think of The Kinks's album-a-year from 1966 to 1971, each one of them either a stone-cold classic or something real damn close, and I realize that if you can't keep up that pace of awesomesauce then you might be teh poo

Tom Creo

Same thing was said about disco, punk rock, and hip hop. If you're in to "next gen's genres pushing boundaries", it's there/here, ya just gotta seek it out and stay away from radio/itunes top 10. If that's your only view, than yeah today's music sucks.

I was reading an article (forgot who) about this anniversary. It stated that itunes is already outdated with the young crowd preferring services like Spotify and Pandora. Apple is about to release their own similar service, tentatively called "iRadio".

JeffTheAlpaca

The one thing I hate is when you want a song from a soundtrack and they force you to buy the entire album.

I wanted a Alanis song from the Narnia soundtrack but I downloaded it online instead.

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Dan

Hell, I'm 31. I own a stupid number of CDs and I once had them all ripped and cleanly organized in iTunes. Now? Fuck that shit. I'm not wasting my time ripping anything to my local hard drive unless it's specifically not available for streaming and I'm desperate enough to listen to it again. For $10/month, I can listen to practically anything immediately. I actually stream a lot of stuff I already own on CD or vinyl. That's just extra pennies in the pockets of the artists I like. And I still buy physical stuff (CDs, Vinyl, merch) from new artists if I like them enough.

As for Apple, they can do iRadio or whatever they call it, but I don't think it'll be as big of a deal as iTunes was. iPods ruled the MP3 market because pretty much anyone could use one with their existing Mac or Windows computer. Since Apple has yet to release any apps on Android, WP8, or Blackberry, I can't imagine they'll have iRadio apps for those platforms.

It's the format-agnostic services that will thrive in this new era of music.
Spotify, Rdio, MOG, etc.... these guys have the widest reach because they're working with all of the mobile platforms in one way or another. It's just a matter of which service sits at the top. If iRadio is for iPhones/iPods only, I just don't think it'll win, but I'll gladly eat some crow if I'm wrong.

Howie2000

Maybe I am just out of touch with the common man but like why do people need to save all these songs on some media form when your butler can alert the house,gym,gazebo etc band to play any song on demand at your whim.

adamblast

Get your troupe of players to mime Wizard of Oz as your barbershop quartet sings Pink Floyd. I hear it's fucking amazing.

EddieMoney

My first mp3 player:

Supermallet

As more and more service providers cap data, streaming seems like more of a dubious long term proposition. Further, you can't always be assured that you'll have a good enough data connection to stream from a mobile device. Streaming is great, but I still want a local backup that I can access without a data connection.

Dan

^but streaming services let you store music on your device too, specifically so you don't have to worry about your data connection.

Supermallet

There's no way it would let me store as much as I can fit on a 160 GB iPod classic.