A Good Reason to Go See a Show Live

“The Album Is in Deep Trouble” exclaims the title of a recent Rolling Stone article. Author Tim Ingham reports that “sales are plummeting, and the music industry is returning to the era of track-led consumption.”

Jim tackles this topic in his post, The Album Is Dead. Long Live the Album, in which he also discusses why performing an album at a concert is a great idea:

“It brings a coherence and a total experience to a musical performance.

And while the album as a unified musical artistic expression is dying, the importance of storyline in a live performance is not.

In fact, isn’t it just possible that musical careers could be built on bucking the trend and developing music with a throughline, intended to be listened to and then eventually performed all in one go?

I think it could. It would be a powerful differentiator in the marketplace if someone could do it in a way that really jazzed a group of fans. …

If there are clever musicians out there who understand that differentiation is what careers are built on, they will use this trend to long-term, permanent advantage. The days of making millions on selling recorded music may be (well, are) over, but a time in which people want to see a long-form musical performance may be upon us.

Maybe instead of performing albums live, perhaps there are long-form collections of music (don’t call them albums) that only get performed live.

Now there’s a concept the right kind of musician with the right kind of following could build a career on.”

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