iTunes sounds death knell for the album
By Andrew Mueller of The Guardian

The launch of a UK branch of Apple's online music store, iTunes, is, without doubt, a good thing. The prices are reasonable, the ease of use giddyingly addictive, the range of music colossal - hopefully more so once Apple sort out their differences with British and European independent labels not yet on board. However, if one aspect of the iTunes store might cause the serious music fan an uneasy pause, it is this: the rock'n'roll album, as the cultural artefact we have known and loved it all these years, is nigh certainly dead.
Apple claim that this is the last thing they intend - at iTunes' launch last month, Apple CEO Steve Jobs showed how to buy entire albums from iTunes, and download cover art to be printed out at home and inserted in your blank CD case. But however good your printer is, these will still look, and feel, like bootlegs - Apple have not, as yet, figured out how to broadcast glossy multiple-page booklets across cyberspace.

That, however, is not the real reason that iTunes will kill the album. The album will go the way of One True Voice because iTunes means that the consumer no longer has to put up with the album's principal flaw: that most songs on most albums are rubbish.

Every iPod owner will already have confronted this discomfiting fact. When stripping your CDs for songs you want to carry around, there are almost no albums that you want all of. With very few exceptions, the albums we love are those which contain four or five songs that we love. Even albums which are absolute classics are prone to Jazz Police Syndrome - named for the bafflingly terrible track which blights Leonard Cohen's otherwise unimpeachable masterpiece I'm Your Man. iTunes means that there is no reason for the punter to put up with songs written by the drummer - you can simply take what you like.

My first iTunes purchase was Dr Hook's The Cover Of The Rolling Stone. I have long loved the song, but was never going to pay - or be seen to pay - for an album full of the rest of the crap that Dr Hook recorded. Now, I don't have to.

Artists with a vision which can sustain an entire album will do fine: it's a dwindling classification, but includes Radiohead (who, as if to reinforce their position as custodians of the album-as-artefact, won't allow individual songs to be sold on iTunes), OutKast, the Streets, or even Alicia Keys, who performed at the iTunes launch.

A future Emma Bunton, say - someone who produces an oeuvre of mediocre gloop redeemed by a solitary moment of transcendence (in her case, the spectacular Nancy Sinatra pastiche Maybe) - may struggle.

Nobody will ever again have to pay for an album full of dufferoos - and, by extension, the writing and performance royalties for a dozen terrible tracks - in order to own the one or two they like. Many artists should be terrified by the implications. Happily, they're generally the ones who deserve to be.