Miscellaneous - May 2009

  by Admin

published: 18 / 4 / 2009

intro

In the latest in his 'Condemned to Rock 'n' Roll' column, Ben Howarth finds the CD, in the age download culture, not dying as many have predicted, but very much flourishing

Wandering the streets of London the other day, I happened upon the Oxford Street branch of HMV, finding it surprisingly busy. If the news media were to be believed (they’re not to be, of course - I mean, swine flu ? Don’t make me laugh), you would imagine that nobody had stepped into HMV for at least five years. But no, here they were, walking around, flicking through the browser racks and – shock horror – picking up CDs and paying for them. As I have explained before in this column, money has been rather tight for the last couple of years, (in fact, do send your cheques, payable to me, c/o pennyblackmusic) and my CD purchases have thinned a tad – which hasn’t been a totally bad thing, I now buy about the number I actually have time to listen to properly. So, I hadn’t once been into a large branch of HMV for months. But, with a new Bob Dylan album available, I was back, and it was then that I noticed that quite a few people had never actually been away. For those of us who still believe that the 45 minute long playing record to be just about the most perfect way to listen to music, this is good news. Despite barmy bands threatening to release their music solely in track-by-track digital download format only, us oddball listeners are still willing to pay for the plastic disc (and, despite what you may have read on the Guardian music blogs, CD sales still outstrip downloads). Some of the better bands (such as Bob Dylan and his band) are going to stick to the tried-and-tested format. And that means people will still be going to HMV. Forecasting the death of the long playing album has been the stock-in-trade for any broadsheet music columnists short of anything interesting to write about for the past couple of years. But, as was pointed out in some reviews of Travis Elborough’s very interesting book ‘The Long Player Goodbye’ last year, the problems actually started a while before the advent of downloads. Actually, I have to admit, the problem started with CDs. They had their plusses (harder to scratch, much easier to store) but also their minuses (still quite easy to scratch, still quite annoying to store). But their worst aspect was that the record industry used the advent of CDs to jack the prices up. Think back ten years, when a good price for an old album was often still thirteen pounds. Indeed, I still shudder whenever I pick up my copy of Rufus Wainwright’s ‘Poses’ (2001), as I’ve never been able to scratch off the price tag which tells that me that I paid the absurd sum of £16.99 for it. Why on earth did we do it ? Worse, though, was the behaviour of the bands, even more prone than their bosses to abusing the CD format. The evidence is probably right there on your own shelf, filed under R. Having made ‘Automatic for the People’ in 1992 (to my ears, a perfect record), it took REM just four years to go completely off their rocker. There’s a good 40 minute album lurking within ‘New Adventures in High-Fi’ (1996), but sensible listeners, having slogged through an additional half-hour of bilge, usually decide it’s not worth looking for. That wasn’t the only one – it doesn’t matter how much they like the band, after 70 minutes, people just want to listen to something else. The download has killed that kind of nonsense off. New albums, I have to concede, are now being made and targeted at the online market, no more tolerant of filler than it is of gateway-sleeved double discs. Expect not to be listening to many instrumental intermissions on new albums this year. But that doesn’t mean the CD market is dead, not at all. Indeed, whilst I was picking up the Dylan, I noticed newly repackaged versions of several early Nick Cave albums and even of Morrissey’s patience-sapping ‘Southpaw Grammar’. Elsewhere in the store, I spied less-than-cheap box sets from Cheap Trick, Patti Smith and, most excitingly, Hall and Oates. Even Jimmy Eat World’s ‘Bleed American’, far from a commonly revered classic and only eight years old, has been subjected to the double disc legacy edition treatment, for Christ’s sake. Naturally, I didn’t buy any of these myself. But someone will have. Indeed, they were all elaborately packaged with cardboard sleeves, lengthy liner notes and extra discs – a sure sign that someone is making money. This is where the download market simply can’t compete – you can’t collect downloads and while you may call that part of your ‘My Documents’ folder a music library, you can’t file them away in alphabetical, autobiographical or genre order either. Furthermore, though 500 CD albums might be stolen (by a robber with fourteen arms), but they won’t cease to exist whenever your laptop next explodes (something, as I found out recently, that really can happen at any time). Even when new music is no longer recorded and released in album form, that won’t alter the fact that all the old stuff was. And that’s how we’re all still going to listen to it - but for much less money than it cost a decade ago. There are so many bargains in HMV, you wonder why anyone, anyone at all, would bother downloading a new album? Look here, David Gilmour’s ‘On An Island’, where the Pink Floyd guitarist makes no pretence of being a songwriter and offers us what we really want: stunning guitar solo followed by a guitar break followed by a guitar solo, with the occasional bit of singing just to fill the gaps. And only £9. But in modern HMV terms, that’s fairly expensive. I’m updating my collection of Wings albums at the moment, and ‘Venus and Mars’ - one I’m missing - is merely £8. Okay, its' not as good a record as ‘Band On The Run’, but it still has the lovely title track (which appears twice, in fact) and the masterful ‘Spirits of Ancient Egypt’. Very much worth having. Or what about this? Fountains Of Wayne’s debut album, which they named after themselves. One of Mojo’s albums of the year in 1997, I’ll have you know. And only £6. That’s before we delve into the Dylan back catalogue, all now available for £5 - a price that the download stores just won’t beat. So what are you waiting for ? The crazed music industry may have decided to slash and burn its biggest asset, but what do we care. Buy now, and sod the consequences. Its what Sir Keith Joseph would have wanted you to do.