reinholdk wrote: > ...and kept the habit of listening to albums and not to a sequence of > unrelated (maybe even randomly selected) tracks. >
This is somewhat off-subject, but the concept of an album as a "complete work" is a relatively recent concept in popular music. 78s and cylinders only allowed for a few minutes of music. While you could buy classical works on 78 records, you ended up with a group of 8 or 10 records. That wasn't done with popular music. Prior to the 1940s, sheet music outsold records and popular songs were purchased as individual works. The song "After the Ball" by Charles Harris was a sheet music pop best seller in the 1890s. It sold 2 million copies in 1892 and perhaps 5 million that decade. The LP (long playing record) wasn't available to consumers until 1948 and through much of the 50s was rarely used as anything more than a collection of songs by the same artist. "Theme" albums (other than Christmas, etc.) didn't really come onto the scene until some of the rock bands in the 1960s started to fancy themselves serious artists. So, one can argue that the sale of individual songs on iTunes, Amazon and similar services is actually a return to the more common was of enjoying popular music for most of the 140 year history of music sales to the public. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ mlsstl's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=9598 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=95603 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
