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Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Don't "Like" The Song, "Like" The Album

Right now I'm listening to Pl3dge, by Killer Mike. I'm on Track 5 ("Burn"), and I can say that the album's certified Tony Montana dope.

And I haven't "liked" one song.

I did this as an experiment to see if I was able to just enjoy an album as a complete work without any obligation to rate each track. I read an article in Esquire that said that this is the Era of the Good Song because we are forced to make instant criticisms on songs as we hear them. Albums don't really sell like back in the day because we've become conditioned to only really respond to instant gradification. We don't have time to take in an artist's or group's whole body of work so we buy the dollar single over the ten-dollar album.

Maybe we need to change this. Maybe if we had the option to rate the album like we do the single LPs would be of better quality. Sure you can "like" an album on Facebook like you "like" a single, but on your iTunes and Zune only ask if you like the song, not the whole work. To Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, the sum of the parts outweigh the whole. Maybe someone needs to fix that.

"Like" Pl3dge.

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