Thom Yorke, lead singer of Radiohead and vice president of the “Extra Silent Hs and Trailing Es Foundation” said in a music magazine interview that it plans to focus on downloadable singles and EPs instead of putting together albums. Yorke claimed that the album format was extremely difficult, creatively, to put together.
But more than that, Radiohead has typically been at the forefront of digital technology and music; pioneering the “pay what you want” model for the digital download version of “In Rainbows.”
Part of it is the fact that digital technology has made selling singles efficient. The Album came about primarily as a way to reduce the costs of printing, shipping, and storing music in the days when music had to be a physical product.
So, really, the news isn’t that Radiohead is moving to singles, but that the album has survived so long in the post-Napster era. While there are some truly connected and well thought-out albums, most of the time an album is two singles and eight filler songs. Even really good albums can be thematically disconnected – Billy Joel’s “Storm Front,” for example. (What the hell does “I Go To Extremes” have to do with “The Downeaster ‘Alexa’?”)
We are also beginning to see this with other media as well – short movies have been rescued from film-festival purgatory and put on YouTube.
It’s going to sound obvious when I say it out loud, but we’ve entered the era when the analog medium is the “special case” and the digital medium the status quo. For most organizations, the next step is not taking what was once analog and making it digital (from phones to VoIP, for example,) but from finding a way to add new digital features to already occupied networks.
I moonlight as a documentary film field producer, and the team I work with is in the planning stages of a project – we talked about what kind of cameras we’re planning to use, and we’re looking at cameras such as the Canon 5DM2, the Panasonic Lumix GH1, and we might possibly be renting a Red One, or, if it comes out by then, a Red Scarlet. The lead producer on the project is smitten with the idea of using film stock for some of the shots, to get a “nostalgic look.”
That’s what the analog method is worth nowadays. Nostalgia.
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