I love music. I buy music. A lot of music. I do not have a single pirated song in my entire collection which, even in compressed form, spans several large hard disks.
So it is becoming increasingly frustrating trying to buy the single track that an artist has that I am interested in and finding out it is either not available online at all, or if it is only available if buy their entire album.
This problem exists across iTunes, Zune Marketplace and Amazon’s MP3 store, and does not seem to be more or less prevalent in any one of them. Usually the same licensing restriction is common, so it is not an issue with the services but with the artist or their label.
If you want to hold the one popular track on your most recent album to ransom by restricting it to whole album purchases, that is, of course, your prerogative. Maybe there are enough weak-willed people out there that they really do buy an album full of dross in order to get the one good track it contains, but for me those days are long since over.
The result, at least so far, has been that I not only do not buy the album, I just ignore the artist as a whole from that point on. So even when they finally allow that one song to be purchased individually I have moved on and lost interest, and thereby you lose any revenue you might have earned from me.
If the album as a whole is good I have, on most occasions, bought my favorite track online so I could satisfy my “want it now” desires, and then ordered the CD via Amazon. I like to have the CD, where the album is worth it, so I can do a lossless rip to ALAC and FLAC and not have to deal with the quality issues that arise when playing back perceptually encoded files on high-end audio gear.
For some reason it bothers me less when entire albums can only be bought as whole albums, than when it is just one track on the album that cannot be purchased without buying all the others. I am still not going to buy the entire thing if I only like or want one of the tracks, but it is less irritating.
It is almost as if the artists following the “you want this particular track, then you are buying the whole album” KNOW that the rest of the album is, essentially, very weak, and personally if that was me I just would not offer the substandard tracks for sale at all.
Instead of building a, perhaps more eclectic or discerning following, you are just alienating potential fans. Over the next few years it seems likely to me that the music industry will undergo a dramatic change. There will be far fewer major stars, more music will be made available directly to listeners, most of the old label-establishment will die out over time. Musicians will wind up being compensated in a manner far more comparable to other professionals.
And when that, inevitably, comes to pass bands like Nine Inch Nails – that seem to just “get” the under currents that are currently swelling into full tidal forces in the music distribution world, are going to fare extremely well, and the one-hit-wonder merchants are going to be fighting tooth and nail for any sales or interest at all.
To the tone-deaf talentless noise-polluters out there … your numbers are almost up …
