For those of you unaware Mark Hoppus of Blink 182 fame has been given his own show on FUSE. A Different Spin with Mark Hoppus airs every Thursday @ 7 pm on FUSE. I am not here to plug his show; frankly if anything he should be plugging my blog; rather I would like to talk about an interesting comment that he said on episode one, season one.
The topic was one that we are all familiar with; the digital download. The conversation focused more on the purchase of the digital single rather than downloading all together. We all know someone who just purchases a song on iTunes rather than the whole album. This has a effect on record sales, which in turn hurts the over all money generated for the record company, hence making it down to the artist. Instead of sitting there and whining about the situation that is the digital single, our esteemed host took a different route. To put it in a nut shell, he stated that the responsibility was with the artist to make better music to ensure the purchase of the whole album.
I was not expecting for him to say that, but it got me thinking that for the most part he was right. Singles allow artists to get away with making sub par albums. If the album doesn't sell a million, maybe their single will, and maybe that is the mentality these days with new bands. This would make sense being that half the new artists that come out these days; especially the ones on the pop chart we never hear from again. It has gotten so bad that some pop artists release singles at a time; not even a whole album at once. Is this because they just don't have the material to make a solid 12 songs?
There is something to be said about taking one's time. I was recently talking to a friend about Buckcherry's album 15. How it was damn near perfection. I honestly believe it is because they took a well deserved break from one another and when they came back years later they had all this great material that they each individually had been knocking around in their heads. In fact so much good material that I wish Josh Todd and Keith Nelson would have taken a little bit longer with their newest album. It could have been so much more.
Bottom line we all should be buying full albums and not just singles, however maybe it is time for our artists to put together a solid album and not just rely on single sale's.
