I thought that would be the case; people are only buying the songs they want from an album, not the entire album. The “CD” is going to be obsolete. We are losers in a couple of ways:
1. The CD began the process, but with the death of the CD comes the death of the genre of “album art.” Some of the best pop art of two generations was on album covers.
2. There are many times I’ve bought a CD, and at first blush one or two songs don’t seem that good. But with exposure, over time I realize they are actually good songs.
But probably the main cause of the collapsed market is that they don’t have anything to market. What is passed as “music” these days is all formulaic canned crap that sounds no different than the rest of the formulaic canned crap out there.
When I was young, I never consumed music by the song, music was one side of an album. I found that frequently, I didn’t really like any individual song but as an album side, the music worked.
Putting together an album side is a lost art.
Yup album art is definitely gone. And loss of deep tracks is bad. So many times I bought an album for song X only to 3 or 4 other songs replace it as my reason for owning the album. Queen was probably the master of the “deep track” all those massive hit songs and 90% are surpassed by most of the album.
Figuring out programmatically what made a hit will probably go down as the worst thing that ever happened to the industry. It had the exact opposite effect of what they wanted. They thought if they could actually program hit music that meant unlimited record sales, in the end it proved to make 100% ephemeral and forgettable music killing all opportunities for experimentation and exploration. And that’s where good music, and music sales decades later, comes from.