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40-to-60-minute package, split into two acts, with accompanying
artwork. Musicians were encouraged to create works that would
be enjoyed as a unitary whole for a protracted period — think of
Dark Side of the Moon,
or
Sgt. Pepper’s
.
No one thinks about albums today. Music is now divisible to
the single, as represented by an individual MP3, and then subdi-
visible into snippets like ringtones and samples. When recording
artists demand that their works be considered as a whole — like
when Radiohead insisted that the iTunes Music Store sell their
whole album as a single, indivisible file that you would have to
listen to all the way through — they sound like cranky throw-
backs.
The idea of a 60-minute album is as weird in the Internet era
as the idea of sitting through 15 hours of
Der Ring des Nibelungen
was 20 years ago. There are some anachronisms who love their
long-form opera, but the real action is in the more fluid stuff that
can slither around on hot wax — and now the superfluid droplets
of MP3s and samples. Opera survives, but it is a tiny sliver of a
much bigger, looser music market. The future composts the past:
old operas get mounted for living anachronisms; Andrew Lloyd
Webber picks up the rest of the business.
Or look at digital video. We’re watching more digital video,
sooner, than anyone imagined. But we’re watching it in three-
minute chunks from YouTube. The video’s got a pause button so
you can stop it when the phone rings and a scrubber to go back
and forth when you miss something while answering an IM.
And attention spans don’t increase when you move from the
PC to a handheld device. These things have less capacity for mul-
titasking than real PCs, and the network connections are slower
and more expensive. But they are fundamentally multitasking
devices — you can always stop reading an ebook to play a hand of
solitaire that is interrupted by a phone call — and their social con-
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