Bob Lefsetz had a great post yesterday about albums vs singles. About how the old world of selling albums has given way to a new digital age of singles and ‘a la carte’ music consumption. In the old paradigm, artists sold a collection of songs because they could. Records, tapes and CDs all held X amount of music, and they had to give someone a certain amount of listening enjoyment for us to pay $10-$20 for the one song we really wanted. We didn’t mind spending $15 for the rest. To experiment. To find the one or two other tracks that moved us. The ones that weren’t supposed to be good.
But we didn’t have the choice we have today.
The digital world changes that. We have access to all artists and their libraries at all times. Mostly for free. We have YouTube and MySpace. Instead of buying the CD, we buy singles. Or we copy them off our friends. There’s no time to experiment. Music isn’t a product anymore — listening to a digital song is an experience. And with so many musical experiences being released each year, month, week and day, supply is killing demand. The time we do have — we can’t just throw that time away on an experiment.
The old gatekeepers and distribution channels meant that our choices in the analog age were limited. We were excited when we heard a new artist or album for the first time. We wanted to know everything about them. To go to their shows. To buy their entire catalog. Now we can’t get away from new artists and new albums. There’s thousands of them now. Maybe hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions.
We wanted choice, but now we have so much that we’re paralyzed by it.
In the digital age of limitless choice and limited attention, there’s no room for most. And that’s why we’ve shunned average. We want the most real. The best. The phattest beats. The most honest. Anything but average. Average falls somewhere in the middle. Even awful — with pants on the ground — is remarkable. Is better than average. Because no one talks about being average.
Be remarkable. Be great. Be strange. Be real. Be anything but average. That’s the lesson of this new digital world.
