Character Writing and Full Albums

How interesting…

Past few days, I’ve been looking and reading over the lyrics I’ve written for this concept album, and just general “jam songs” I wrote that don’t fit the 2 EP’s or the album. It seems that writing about characters I make up, instead of the standard hip-hop lyrical topics (sex/drugs/money/grinding/girls/violence/bragging/etc.) has made writing more exciting than ever now.

There’s more possibilities to it now, more paths to take, and more of a desire to create a narrative than to just make an album that has 3 singles, and 9 filler tracks.

Which brings me to my next point: I’m reading and seeing a disturbing trend in music nowadays…the death of the album.

Gone are the days of a 60 minute banger from track 1 to track 12. Now, it’s more akin to a math equation:

ALBUM = Intro+Filler+Single+Collab+Filler+Single+Skit+Filler+Filler+Skit+Collab Single+Skit+Ending

See what I’m getting at? “Albums” are like badly made sandwiches…the good stuff buried underneath layers of useless filler that doesn’t sit well.

Sadly, it’s because of us musicians making bad albums and expecting people to pay 14.95 USD plus tax that albums are now heading to the grave. Once Napster came up, that was it. Game over for the album.

It was revenge overdue for the consumer who bought garbage albums. The con game was over, and the cheated got revenge, by getting what they wanted for free. Now, you see the music industry push acts who can move singles and ringtones, and move 10 mill. However, the album comes out and BOOM… 75K moved within the time the single moved 10 mill.

So I’m thinking about this as an artist working on a piece of work that can’t be sold individually. They have to be together to work, to make sense. Makes me pensive about putting it on iTunes…if I ever did.

I love iTunes, but with all the other sites out there, like Bandcamp.com, I can just set my own price, do giveaways, add bonus tracks, and other stuff. Also, you can mandate “full package downloads” which makes this album a lot easier to market.

On that note, I say “peace”. And hopefully, this summer micro-tour works out. 2 years is not too long to go without a performance…just like not drinking water for 4 weeks is just ok.

[end sarcasm]

-mc larny