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]

Ironically, the Beatles album that sounds most unified thematically and emotionally to me is a U.S.-only release from 1964 that was called The Beatles' Second Album, and appropriately enough was their third album. Was the second on Capitol, though, EMI's U.S. subsidiary having - unbelievably - passed on the actual first Beatles album (called Please Please Me in Britain, released in truncated form as Introducing The Beatles on Vee Jay, an indie r&b label). The Beatles' Second Album was a hodge-podge containing an older single that Capitol had also passed on ("She Loves You," which had been licensed to Swan, another indie r&b label), plus some leftovers that hadn't gotten on the American version of the next album ('cause American albums were shorter than British albums until about 1966, don't ask me why), plus a few from the British follow-up, and containing a disproportionate number of cover songs (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Smokey & the Miracles, Barrett Strong/The Kingsmen, the Marvelettes); the reason it sounds so unified is that it's dark, not just in the sense that it's very r&b, but also in the song choice and the performances, "You Really Got A Hold On Me" being raw pain, even more so than the Smokey original, and "Money" being raw pain as well, completely negating the humor and exuberance of the Kingsmen and Barrett Strong versions. "Devil In Her Heart" and "You Can't Do That" (and even the verses of "She Loves You" - "You said you hurt her so, she almost lost her mind"!) fitting right in, "You treat me badly, I love you madly" running logically into "She's got the devil in her heart (no! this I can't believe)" to "The best things in life are free/But you can give 'em to the birds and bees" to "But if it's seen, you talkin' that way, they'd laugh in my face." All this on an album that I assume was thrown together almost at random by the record company.

[koganbot]

Also, this album is my hands-down favorite Beatles album.