Mark Cuban’s idea for music: The Album is dead

Posted by Daniel Stout on Sat 19 Jan 2008 at 11:43 AM

Billionaire and sports fanatic Mark Cuban has an idea for the music industry: instead of releasing albums, serialize the release of music so people can buy one song at a time over a period of time. He writes:

If an artist commits to release music on a weekly or bi weekly basis, then consumers can make a commitment knowing they are going to get something new and hopefully exciting for their 99c. If the commitment is strong enough its feasible that artists could sell subscriptions to their serialized releases. My guess is that consumers will feel better about subscribing to an artist and getting a song a week or every 2 than dropping 10 dollars at a time for an album.

Cuban looked at the sale of digital singles and sees a market for individual songs, whereas he sees the market for albums has dried up.

I don’t really agree with that assessment. CDs don’t sell like they used to, but there’s strong evidence that there’s a market for albums. I wrote earlier this week about an article in Time that notes that vinyl LP sales rose 15% in the past year to nearly a million records. That’s something. Those are all people who wanted good sound and wanted an artifiact – a physical object to hold and keep in their collection.

I was the fifth commenter on Cuban’s blog post, and read throught the fifty or so other comments after that for some interesting discussion of Mark’s idea.

Serialization for music could only be a niche. It’s not like serializing a novel, where a novelist is writing a novel over the span of months, and segments can be easily chunked out. When it comes to music, the studio time is booked in such a way to maximize bang for the buck. It’s expensive so usually artists are working under some type of deadline. Writing doesn’t have that type of overhead. So while the serialization idea is interesting, it would take some pretty fundamental changes to the way music is typically recorded to make it work well.

Tags: albums · hit singles · mark cuban · music · vinyl

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