Something I said on ILM yesterday.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Which nobody addressed - the thread was moving fast and this was a tangent.

I can think of two long-term marketing triumphs for the record industry. The former possibly accidental (but probably not), the latter definitely on purpose. First is the promotion of the album as a format and the repackaging of popular music as non-disposable. Second (linked to the first) is the promotion and success of the CD format as a way to buy old music as well as new.

It's the level of accident I'm interested in really. The move to album format, the move away from disposability - when did these happen (I know that in the UK 1969 was the year album sales overtook single sales), and how proactive or reactive were the record labels in this?

Comments

[koganbot]

It was a buildup from several years earlier, but the payoff year was 1968, when Cream's Disraeli Gears was the best-selling album in the U.S. As for proactive the record labels were, I have no idea, nor do I know who "the record labels" consisted of, but my guess is that starting in 1964 not only were there a swarm of rock bands with a new business model that gave the bands more creative control than performers had had previously (and more say in business decisions) but also a swarm of new people working for the record companies, and these people passionately believed in the social and artistic value of what the rock bands were doing. So the idea of the music's social and artistic value would lead naturally to valuing every song on an album and even promoting an album as a unified aesthetic statement. I don't have specific information to back up these assertions, but they do ring true to me, that the social and the aesthetic decisions had a commercial payoff in the successful selling of a more expensive format, rather than people thinking "How can we get people to buy the more expensive format?"