(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
2004's hitherto most powerful record is a mix album compiled by DJ veteran Bobby Konders. Based in New York, Konders has long had his finger on the pulse of what's going on in house, disco, hip hop and reggae, and ever since the early 90 he has devoted himself to dancehall with his Massive B Sound system.
"Mad Sick Head Nah Good Mix – Greensleeves Official Dancehall Mix-Tape" (Greensleeves / Tuba) is an insane mix of 65 fresh hits from Jamaica's dancehall scene in as many minutes. It not only offers basic subjects in dancehall in just over an hour, but also shows a possible path into the future of pop music. Not only is dancehall an artistic influence on everything from techno and hip hop to reindeer pop, but the extreme tabloid is carried out of the pop music Konders performs – by cutting the songs down to just under a minute – also shows how impatient the song-focused pop industry has become again.
Single-age
In reggae, r & b and hip hop, we have seen the trends for a long time: The music forms are distinctly single- and song-focused. An artist is not allowed to release an album until he or she has a handful of hits to refer to, and when the album appears, it is rarely more than a 50/50 collection of hits, potential hits and fillers. The latest albums from Britney Spears, Elephant Man and G-Unit are just three examples in each genre.
The trend goes back funny enough to the pop industry's childhood years in the 50's and 60's, when albums with Elvis Presley, The Beatles and The Beach Boys were just compilations with hits and fillers. The album format was originally intended for classical and jazz, but a change forced itself in the 60s – both artistically and commercially.
The pop albums sold adventurously, and The Beatles spearheaded the pop artists' struggle to use the format for something more ambitious than hit collections. Experts dispute what the first full-length album was, but both "Rubber Soul" and "Revolver" by The Beatles were undoubtedly important in paving the way for a new artistic form of expression: the rock album.
Technological revolution
From the middle of the 60 century, most of the artists moved on, and the album has since been the accepted form of expression, while the singles were seen as a fortnight entertainment and pastime.
But in line with the technological revolution and the development of the Internet, the song has returned cruelly. Why should a consumer buy an expensive album when the individual songs are freely available online?
Illegal downloading has become a major headache in the record industry, and after several futile attempts to curb the phenomenon, the industry is about to turn the tile and offer sales of individual songs instead. Apple's iPod players are a walkman variant with huge storage capacity for music, and while the nostalgic value of albums will probably keep the format afloat for many years, I can't imagine new generations of record buyers as such new solutions are becoming better, more convenient, less expensive and consumer friendly.
For the artists, this means a greater focus on single songs, and in the time ahead, compilation albums and mixed albums will probably become more common – whether it is in electronic format or old-fashioned CD edition. But the album will probably live on for many years, but then in still new variants. We already see that record companies and artists are becoming more imaginative in their work to make the albums offer more than a collection of songs.
DVD bonus
DVD technology comes in handy here, and the examples are many: Metallica's “St. Anger ”came out with a separate concert DVD where the band played their new record live. "Payable On Death" by the metal group POD was followed by a band documentary and a PlayStation 2 game, while Coldplay's "Live 2003" and Linkin Park's "Live In Texas" came out as a double package: Regular audio CD and concert film in DVD format.
The concert records as we know them are probably already dead, and will probably always be released in film versions with documentaries from the life behind the stage ahead. And after we thought that the record companies couldn't come up with new and better versions of classic albums anymore, the opportunity therefore came to refresh the classics with concert and documentary films. Soon: Classic albums on CD accompanied by documentaries about the album or artist on DVD.
