This was Bob Seger (not me) in 2006 (courtesy of Jalopnik)

In the almost totally selfish interest of uploading new content to the blog without doing much work, I present a post I wrote three years ago about Bob Seger and his (then) refusal to allow users to download tracks off of his albums; instead, they would be forced to download the whole thing, which was basically Radiohead’s model on Rhapsody up until a couple of years ago. I never ended up posting it anywhere, so it is new content (sort of).

At any rate, here is my post, entitled, “Greed is greed no matter how you disguise it.” Enjoy.

To the chagrin of music executives across the country, services such as iTunes, Napster, and eMusic have changed the way that consumers value albums. Between radio airplay and the ability to purchase tracks à la carte, the consumer now is free to take what he or she likes from an album and ignore the rest of it. Artists and producers no longer can benefit from throwing a few garbage tracks in between a handful of decent ones and calling it an “album” with a straight face.

For anyone familiar with the decline of the music industry, though, this should come as no surprise.  Since the glory years during the 1990s, a decade the music industry would love to revisit because of soaring compact disc sales, consumers realized that paying $15 for an album with three decent tracks and nine inaudible ones was not money well spent. Thus, technological advances + demand for individual tracks spawned the online music industry.

Aside from the Beatles and Led Zeppelin (who have been reluctant to embrace any new technology or licensing agreements), most artists have seen the value in the new digital marketplace and have adapted to it. However, there still are some dinosaurs roaming the music landscape, and after I read this article about Bob Seger, I was reminded that artists are willing to exploit their fans if it means pocketing a few more dollars.

“Seger, the legendary rocker from Michigan who entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, is considering releasing his classic 1976 album ‘Night Moves,’ but wants to make it so it only can be downloaded as an album, Andrews said.”

The quote above was taken from this article:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/ptech/08/21/itunes.holdouts.ap/index.html

I have accepted the usual line that comes with the “album only” idea. The great artist does not want to hurt the integrity of his or her work by splitting it into single tracks.  The artist’s belief that his or her work is incomplete unless experienced from start to finish is a fine idea, if it were consistently enforced.  Artists like Seger, though, also are willing to cut the highlights from their work and paste them together for their “Greatest Hits” albums.

For instance, Seger’s landmark album Night Moves features nine songs. Two of them appear on his first greatest hits disc (“Night Moves” and “Mainstreet”) and three more show up on the second greatest hits disc (“The Fire Down Below,” “Sunspot Baby,” and “Rock & Roll Never Forgets”). So, five of the nine songs on his career-defining album already have been split into two different greatest hits albums. If he were so concerned about the integrity of his work, why issue two greatest hits discs? Well, for more money, of course. By throwing in “previously unreleased” material, he and his record company hope to sucker fans into spending more money on material of which they own the majority anyway.

Purchasing individual tracks clearly would solve this issue. The consumer could purchase the tracks he or she does not own already and move along without paying twice for much of the same music. This is, after all, one of the reasons that download services are so successful, and it is ideal for consumers who value the music they already own on other formats, such as cassette tape and vinyl.

I also have trouble taking Seger seriously when he argues for “album integrity.” This is the same man who licensed his Diet Coke rock ballad “Like a Rock” to Chevrolet for about a decade. I remember living in four different areas of the country throughout my life and hearing his song during Chevy truck commercials. His song was licensed, by itself, for a decade. However, someone who owns both an iPod and a Chevy truck could not log in to iTunes and purchase the track by itself, legally, to rock out to it with the windows down.

If artists such as Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and the Rolling Stones can embrace and benefit from using 21st Century technology to sell music, there is no reason why someone like Seger should be taken seriously for being a stick in the mud.