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Originally Posted by BFT3K
Exactly, and the loss of "album" sales to "single" sales hurts as well. You used to buy an album for maybe 2 or 3 great songs, but overtime you would often gain an appreciation of the songs that didn't get airplay too. Sometimes the album conveyed a "feeling" that carried throughout the tracks. Now people are buying one single track at a time. There is no time to decide if you even like any of the other songs the artist has made, because you never allowed them to grow on you. In addition, the sound quality of these compressed files often suck, but since that's the easiest way to consume them, you even lose out on rich full quality sound now as well.
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Well christ, when you can go to YouTube and hear all new tracks of an album on demand the moment it's out. That's not some seedy pirate site behind the scenes but right in broad daylight so to speak as the 3rd highest traffic site on the planet!
I'm not sure I'm entirely against the music biz going more towards song by song vs. album - it had started getting to the point where record companies stuff a few radio singles per album and fill the rest of the space with crap. That said, I'd imagine it might hurt smaller artists who may get 1 of their songs seen and consequently get only 1 of their songs sold. Music has never been an industry where a significant amount of its participants see success, but it's also not exactly comforting to know that the most visible artists in the past decade have been for the most part glorified whores with millions of dollars of marketing behind them.