The End of the Album

The New York Times has an article that discusses the end of the album in favor of singles.

I'm kind of saddened by this. Granted, I'm all about the market deciding what should be sold and at what price, but what this effectively means is that the music landscape may change forever. No longer will music be enjoyed as a compilation of songs artistically sewn together to form a near hour long melody of expression. Instead, all music will exist in the wham-bam-thank-you-mam quickee format that pervades the radio airwaves today. While some bands like Tool and Radiohead, as the article mentions may still have demand for their full length albums, the net result is that generations will now be brought up to appreciate only singles and not full bodies of work. I for one think music quality will degrade as a result. Music will be all about entertaining a mass of people for 4 minutes at a time, instead of enthralling the listener for hour blocks of time.

I'm Trendy Now

Yup, I finally succumbed to the trendiness that is portable music players. Except I didn't completely fall head first into the world of the chic iPod. Instead I picked up a new Sandisk Sansa. I bought this primarily because I didn't want to shell out a premium price on an iPod... I bought my Sansa e280r for $199, which has 8GB of storage, can do video, images, has a tuner, and a voice recorder. Also, I can just mount it linux and write music directly to the player, instead of being forced through some type of audio library manager. It also integrates with Rhapsody, which at the time I didn't think was a big deal, but I've just realized that as part of the subscription I have I listen to practically anything and download it to my Sansa. Albeit I don't own it, which kind of stinks and I can't use the music freely, a subscription is only ~$15 bucks a month... which is how much just a single cd costs anyway. So I figure it's not a bum deal.

Now, compare all of this to similar iPod model, which ties me to iTunes (or gtkpod) to do anything, and costs ~$250 for 30GB of storage. It was pretty much a no-brainer for me.