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Opinion | The album is (only kind of) dead

Andrew Duberstein, dubersaj@muohio.edu

This week, Billboard, the music industry's flagship magazine, created a post about a dubious but record-breaking distinction set by the band Cake.

The band's album sales topped the Billboard 200, while pushing a modest 44,000 copies its first week out. Cake sold the fewest albums to make a chart topper since Nielsen started monitoring sales in 1991, a record broken only the week before. This does not bode well for the future of the album.

However, though a dying medium with noteworthy virtues like a narrative arc, two artists have done the presently unthinkable and sold it. Fans purchased

Kanye West's My Dark Twisted Fantasy (MDTF) to the tune of 496,000 copies as Taylor Swift received in excess of a million sales her first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. How do these two artists grip our attention for full hours rather than the typical three to four minutes?

A Grammy-nominated single, acclamation from venerated media outlets like The New York Times and Rolling Stone and nearly a million copies sold, Kanye West's My Dark Twisted Fantasy has vied for top placement on every meaningful best of 2010 music list.

The layers of choirs, orchestra, samples, poetry and percussion bring me multiple times a week. The rap sensation and emotional mogul's album has played a total of 24 times on my iPod in entirety since its release in late November.

The car stereos of friends and Billboard sales numbers seem to suggest I am not alone in my experience of ecstasy at MDTF. Similarly, Swift's album, released about a month before, had a palpable magnetism on the nation, a composition which many fans of Kanye's hoped, albeit maliciously, would undersell theirs.

Like West, Taylor Swift received numerous distinctions for her release Speak Now. No hotcakes analogy could aptly capture the volume of sales for her work, which received almost 10,000 more reviews on iTunes than Kanye's release.

Both artists are anomalies for the era of digital downloads when singles have trounced albums.

When vinyl was the only option for listening, fans had to buy albums as a whole with no customization except for track skipping.

Then, mix tapes freed listeners from the tyranny of the album. CD burning allowed for even finer control of single songs, until digital downloads forced the album into seeming retirement.

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The two or three songs we wanted became all we needed to buy as the casual fanatic.

This is why Kanye and Swift have done the extraordinary. They created two poignant albums, not merely singles, that people considered worth listening to multiple times, presumably as entities.

They engage us, stretch our attention spans and allow us to indulge a story of heartbreak, forgiveness and love or egotism, materialism and humility. They make us realize that Kanye West is not merely one thing — materialistic, conceited or a wildly talented producer — but rather as complex as any one particular individual might be, the difference between a handshake and introduction with an acquaintance and sitting down for a cup of coffee with him or her.

As if charismatic, their work makes us want to listen. Like a liberal arts education, they shatter our provincial stereotypes of hip-hop or country and hook us into something larger with clever lyrics and heartfelt storytelling.

What's not dying, then, is the album. What's disappearing is lackluster quality, the kind which fails to retain our attention.

Fashion, music, theatre, all staples of culture, some always lament, are dying. This complaint is, in fact, at least as old as the 1700s.

Art has not died and will not die, but will evolve as the shapes of a lava lamp, seeking no distinct form for more than a given instant.

Journalism will gradually be supplanted by the blogosphere, radio by podcasts, books by e-books, analog television by digital television, classical concerts by soundtrack concerts.

Each medium will come with virtues and vices, but those that grip our focus will remain. Let the album die, then, but thank West and Swift for displaying its better assets.