Opinion: Do pre-release album streams encourage cherry-picking?
I’ve abandoned Spotify and iTunes this morning in favour of MySpace, listening to pre-release streams of the new albums by Kasabian and Little Boots.
A few plays later, and I’ve got a pretty good idea which tracks are great and which are fodder. Come next Monday when the albums come out, I’ll probably be buying 4-5 tracks from each album.
As a consumer, the ability to listen to albums before their release is a huge benefit, letting me figure out before buying whether Kasabian’s new psychedelic direction means they’ve ditched the tunes, or whether Little Boots is style over substance (in both cases, the answer is ‘not entirely, but a little bit’, since you ask).
But what’s the effect for an industry that’s trying to encourage fans to buy more digital albums rather than cherry-picking the tracks they like?
You could argue that the increasing popularity of such pre-release streams on MySpace, Spotify and We7 – not to mention the full-fat streaming services offered by those and other companies – actively encourages cherry-picking. With Spotify working with 7Digital on the ability for users to buy entire playlists, this will only increase.
I should be clear: I’m not claiming this is A Bad Thing And Should Be Stopped. It ties into the whole ‘if artists want people to buy their whole albums, they should stop putting duff tracks on them’ debate, after all. And it may be that by allowing such cherry-picking, net sales actually rise as people buy more music.
It would be fascinating to see some research into the purchasing habits of fans who stream before they buy, though. Do they buy less full albums but more music overall? And if so, will this hasten – cliche alert – the death of the album? Or, if you want a more wordy phrase to describe what the likes of Spotify are up to, the rise of the self-compiled digital compilation? I said it was wordy…
Tags: kasabian, little boots, music ally, Myspace, spotify, we7
June 4th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
[...] Music Ally | Blog Archive » Opinion: Do pre-release album streams … [...]
June 5th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
The way the question is phrased is obviously putting a negative lean on the idea of pre-release album streams. The question could just as easily been phrased as “do pre-release album streams give consumers the freedom to make informed decisions when buying music?”
Before people had the ability to both stream albums and to purchase individual songs (as opposed to only having the option to purchase entire albums), the consumer would either be stuck with an album where they only like 1 or 2 songs, or they would choose not to buy the album at all after deciding there was not enough content to make it worthwhile.
Before we had gotten to this point where we could buy individual songs, I used to go to the record store and preview an album on a listening station. If I liked most of the album, I would buy it. Otherwise, I would pass.
Do you think it is a *good* thing that record stores have listening stations even though it may potentially lead a consumer to realize that buying a particular album would be a bad decision? Or do you think it it would be better for the consumer to hear the single, be forced to buy the album blind and be stuck with an album he hates?
If you compare it to in-store listening stations and traditional CD buying, then I would say that this only benefits the artist and the consumer. Where a person would otherwise have passed on the album, he has now bought a few songs. Where a person would have bought the album, he will still buy it (you still get a better price point for buying the full album over each song on its own.)
In the past, there were many times after getting home and listening to an album I bought that I wished I didn’t waste $19 on a CD with only 2 songs I actually wanted.