Sales of legitimate digital downloads are beginning to flatten, too. A few big names, most notably Radiohead, are experimenting with releasing their new albums on their own Web sites (Radiohead asked downloaders for a donation and collected millions, all of which it keeps). But that won't work for lesser-known acts.
Some in the business think the answer is the subscription service, a la Rhapsody, which provides customers with all the music they want to play on their PCs or digital players for a flat monthly fee - but only as long as they keep up the payments. Others think the industry may have to give away its music free online and try to sell advertising around it - more like TV and radio.
There's no question that musicians and record labels will have to re-think the way they do business. That means earning their fans' respect and money one tune at a time.
This is a true back-to-the-future movement. When I was growing up in the '50s and '60s, artists regularly released "singles," as they were known, usually on 45 rpm vinyl records. When singers or group had a few hits under their belts, they could package them with a handful of covers, B-side tunes and one or two new songs into an album. In fact, the modern "album" was a creation of what was then a new technology: the 33 1/3 rpm "long-playing" stereophonic record.
Many music historians credit The Beatles with changing the business landscape for everyone with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - the first megahit album conceived as a unified artistic work. The problem - few groups, including The Beatles ever afterward, could come up with 12 or 14 songs at a time that were worth listening to on one recording.
But the business model held up - as long as the industry had a lock on the physical medium of its recordings. That's gone now, and it's not clear what will take its place.
Mark Cuban, the Internet broadcasting pioneer and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, came up with one intriguing scenario in a posting on blogmaverick.com entitled "The Album is Dead ... ".
Citing a Billboard report showing that the song "Low Rider" by Flo Rida had sold 467,000 units in a single week - one of 27 digital downloads with sales of over 100,000 during that period - Cuban concluded that "people are ready, willing and able to buy singles of songs they like."
So he asked, "Why not create a `season' of release of songs, much like the fall TV season, and promise fans that Flo Rida is going to release a new single every week or two weeks for the next 10 weeks"
