The Music Blog: On the rise of streaming and death of the album format

With the release of More Life, Drake became the first major label mainstream artist to release a playlist, effectively marking the beginning of previously speculated eventual death of the album format.

This is another win for digital streaming barely months after Billboard began accepting stream equivalents for sales certifications. Over the last few years, media streaming has become both a quagmire and innovative future of content consumption. Content creators formerly stacked against the odds of an open world internet where content was accessed freely now have the option of availing them on streaming platforms for revenue, but only for a fraction of what platform owners actually make. Yet after nearly 100 years of morphing through phonographs, jukeboxes and mixtapes, streaming remains an inevitable foreseeable future for music and all other adjacent media.

Amongst the paranoia-inducing consequences of a digital streaming world, is the erasure of physical ownership of media formats. CDs, DVDs and even mp3s are heaving last sighs as music database collections are not only stored on cloud servers but also formatted by different streaming platforms for varying degrees of limited subscription-based access. The implication of this however, casts different hues on both artists and consumer.

For users, curation has replaced discovery. All major music streaming platforms from Netflix to Pandora now use algorithms to determine what a subscriber would want to hear based on data collected from listening history and user behaviour. While this solves the age-long music industry conundrum of trying to narrow down music to specifically what audiences want to hear, it also places power arbitrarily in the hands of streaming platforms that already know what we want and how we want it.

On the artist side of the moon, the shade is cast even darker. As I established earlier, though a better alternative to a total lack of, artist revenue from streams are still paltry at best. The salt to this injury is the boundless access users have to artist discographies once they have an active subscription. Music fans no longer need to buy multiple albums to listen to a handful of songs across board if curated playlists already have a mix of all the most popular tunes they’d want to hear. For pop arttists like Drake therefore, the incentive to create a cohesive body of work is defeated by the more profitable alternative if the best singles are merely strung together, then passed off as a playlist. But while the erasure of albums will maximise profits for major-label artists with heavy marketing and advertising budgets, independent artists will have to work extra hard to crease the charts.

However, all is not so glum in the age of streaming. For a single-hits based music industry like Nigeria’s, Drake’s playlist model may finally rid artists of the album curse. Going by the numbers, even the most successful Nigerian artists have come other fire for their inability to make albums that would test boundaries of creativity or survive the relevance of its era. Official playlist releases could become a turning point for sure-bet hitmakers like Olamide, with low album conversion.

Beyond the death of albums, the rise of streaming has also culminated a series of events, including the rescinding of the recording industry’s power by artists who now potentially have more control over distribution and the reign of DIY musicians who can now self-publish at the convenience of one click. Last year, Chance The Rapper and Frank Ocean released streaming only albums that charted on Billboard’s Hot 100. Perhaps, instead of fighting the digitisation of music consumption, artists and audiences alike need to evolve new ways to maximise its potentials. Albums will, however, still have a place in the artistry of storytellers and creatives who still care about due process. And when you really think long and hard enough about it, maybe this is how it was always meant to be.

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