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White Collar Criminals

BOB LEFSETZ ON THE AC/DC – iTUNES ISSUE

 Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 11:02am by

It made headlines recently when AC/DC guitarist Angus Young told the Telegraph that the band’s music isn’t on iTunes because “We don’t make singles, we make albums.” Other bands have expressed a similar attitude towards the single-friendly digital music store – Tool springs to mind – but in this day and age of iPods, creating playlists, illegal downloading, etc., one wonders if this position is even tenable.

Music biz guru Bob Lefsetz apparently feels the same way, as expressed in his latest rant:

“My blood started to boil when I read the quotes. Because these rich motherfuckers, who happen to have made some great music, are living in the nineties and ONLY care about money. There’s this lip service to creating albums that must be heard this way, but if that’s the case, why don’t they put out records that are one giant cut, so we’re FORCED to listen to the whole damn record.”

Lefsetz notes that “power of a full album” argument didn’t even really hold water in the pre-digital era (“I didn’t listen to Back In Black all the way through every time when I only had the VINYL!” he cries), accuses the band of hypocrisy (“Why don’t they ban singles from the radio too!”) and notes that “the cume of both Zeppelin and Metallica WENT UP after they were available on iTunes” before continuing:

“[AC/DC] are the second biggest catalog seller. Behind the Beatles. WHY? Because kids have traded their songs and found out how great their classics are. But now they want to fuck these same kids in the ass and make them buy their new album at Wal-Mart. So they can make fuckloads of money. The whole world is listening to files, shuffling their tracks, but these ignorant musicians from Down Under don’t seem to have gotten the message. Why don’t they tell everybody to give up their computers and use typewriters while they’re at it.

“The joke is illegal acquisition will dwarf CD sales. Whatever is sold legitimately will be distributed online INSTANTLY! Which is great for the band ultimately. Breeding new fans. But, like the rest of he industry, the band wants to ignore this. Even though without the aforementioned trading of the past decade their tour would not instantly sell out.

“At least throw kids a bone. Let them buy tracks legitimately… AC/DC’s album will be available track by track. And that’s how it will be listened to. The only difference is, THEY’RE NOT GOING TO GET PAID!”

Lefsetz makes a good point; bands like AC/DC can’t and won’t be able to stop people from listening to their album track by track or, ultimately, only owning the tracks he or she enjoy. But as a fan of the art of the complete album, it also feels as though there’s something defeatist about Lefsetz’s argument: just because you can’t win a fight doesn’t necessarily mean you’re should give up (It’s also worth noting that Lefsetz hasn’t liked any of the band’s albums since Back in Black – maybe he’d be less inclined to wage this war against a band he found more artistically relevant?).

So where do you stand? Should people only be allowed to purchase full albums? Is iTunes the death of music? Or are AC/DC just revealing themselves to be dinosaurs of a bygone era?

-AR

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  • jonowev

    I fully support AC/DC on this one as I only ever listen to full albums. I hate this new quick-fix download culture that Apple has built for themselves.

  • I, Monarch

    I’m a strong supporter of full album listening and would prefer that people didn’t only buy singles as they usually do when downloading but by now the culture is too far gone to make any difference about it. So I think its kind of ridiculous to NOT put albums onto iTunes the way it usually is as they are going to download it from somewhere else anyway. And chances are some portion of people are going to download their whole albums as well as the ‘singles’ most people buy.
    There’s always CDs.

  • Mick

    iTunes makes some music available only as complete album downloads, so AC/DC’s stand is weak- either they are unaware of this or there is something deeper at hand. Perhaps they are concerned about seeing (what I call) ‘the vertical popularity bars’ which appear next to each song on iTunes. Are they concerned that, as much as we all love them, there’s plenty of, uh, ‘bull’ in the band’s catalogue?

    I suspect it has more to do with the royalty scale between record companies and iTunes; and I’m willing to bet AC/DC is financially shrewd enough to wait for a bigger slice. Which is unfortunate, as the longer they wait, the more they stand to lose (think of the online sales spike driven by an album release/world tour).

    I understand what they’re doing; but there’s plenty of AC/DC that I don’t want on my iPod.

  • Walker

    I dont understand why the band only released the record to Walmart. I mean, they are the largest retailer, but they are not the only retailer. It does seem that they are a bit obsessed with money, considering as a fan who does not want to spend 90 bucks to see them at the IZOD center. Did the record even sell well?

  • jaime

    I am a full supporter of listening to full albums… when the full albums are good enough to listen to. Let’s face it, this AC/DC album is going to have a TON of filler, pretty much everything they have ever done has. I think the “album as art” is an awesome concept, a lot of my favorite bands pull it off but, a lot of great bands don’t.

    To jonowev, you’ve never turned off an album in the middle of it to put something else on? Isn’t that just the same thing? Let people listen to what they want, if someone only likes two AC/DC songs, why should they have to buy the whole album to get them? When bands take such a hardline stance like this (and they are a glorified party band like AC/DC), they are only going to breed illegal downloading.

  • Mark

    First of all, I don’t know where this info is coming from that AC/DC is only releasing thier albulm to Wall Mart. I work for Futureshop and we are already taking pre-orders. But that of course is in Canada and it might be different in the U.S ( But usually the U.S has more options for customers, more stores, etc ) If AC/DC doesn’t want thier stuff on Itunes what’s the big deal? Don’t you think they have done enough to deserve to do what they want? Besides, maybe they realize you can get stuff for free and Itunes is kinda a scam. The internet and so forth may yet destroy album buying as we know it, so maybe we should support AC/DC’s decision. Anyway, hail to the best Rock band that ever was. BTW-Vancouver’s concert on the 28th of November sold out in four minutes breaking a record for the city. I was lucky to get 2 tickets! )

  • jonowev

    I’m not saying that other people cant listen to single tracks, i’ve just found that over the past few months listening to full albums has helped my musical tastes mature rapidly, and I feel like a more dedicated music fan because of it.

    Of course it helps that I have such an exceptional music taste that I only ever aquire good albums so I never feel the need to turn one off… ;)

  • tyoung865

    solutions…. full album download only… or make the album one long track with a moment of silence in between each song… there will always be purists who enjoy the full albums and there will always be those who are casual listeners and only like certain songs. unfortunately it seems as though the latter = the masses

  • Mike Malice

    When you sell millions of albums, you can decide how you want them sold.

    I hate AC/DC anyways but I’m sure they are aware that people who like them will buy the album and people who don’t care so much will steal it.

  • rd5

    I don’t understand the big deal over how one listens to the music he or she legally purchases. It’s simply a matter of attention span (and also having an album worth spinning the whole way through). But I can’t help but laugh at AC/DC coming off as though singles haven’t contributed to their success. Hell, I bet if one could come up with the numbers, I’d guess that the most thoroughly played AC/DC album is some sort of greatest hits compilation anyway.

    “Fuck iTunes mate, let’s just suck WalMart’s dick.”

  • PD

    I didn’t bother to read the other responses, but here’s my 2 cents.

    Why bother to put out an album if you can just be like any other Pop/Hip-Hop/Radio artist out there and just release singles?

    Isn’t the whole point of an album, for the most part, to put together a set of tracks that have some cohesive elements? I don’t know about other people, but I like to see where a band is coming from with their sound, how it has progressed from album to album, etc. Singles and listening to tracks on shuffle kill this aspect of the music which I find extremely important.

  • Sammy

    On the one hand, they are dinosaurs with a terrible attitude towards the modern music fan. On the other hand, most of their fans are “that guy” who hasn’t bought any music from a contemporary artist since he was in high school.

    But let’s face it. The real reason they’re not selling on iTunes is because Wal-mart agreed to pre-pay for 3 million copies of the record. The album is triple-fucking-platinum out of the fucking gate. It was about money. So, from that perspective, more power to them (AC/DC). It was a brilliant financial move.

  • http://www.last.fm/user/cooperaa Aaron

    I used to listen to radio stations until I decided “Fuck that! I’m not going to let someone else tell me what to listen to!”

    I used to like listening to full album but then I realized “Fuck that! I’m not going to listen to shitty songs just because they’re on a good album.”

    I still download only full albums, but I’m not going to listen the whole thing together just because they came packaged together. I don’t like “The Thing That Should Not Be” as much as I like “Battery” so why in the world would I listen to it as often as Battery?

  • dthrasher

    Yea, maybe they would have a legit argument if they weren’t only releasing the cd at walmart.

  • http://www.myspace.com/unholy2 Zack

    I don’t understand the hate for people who like to listen to certain tracks. It’s not like them doing this is preventing you in any way from listening to it like you want to.

  • gnarlk

    ac/dc doesn’t release albums, they just re-record the same album every 8 years under a new name and dirt rockers every where jerk their chains over it.

  • Sammy

    @gnarlk: You obviously know nothing about music. I’ve heard a rumor that the new AC/DC album has an F# minor chord on it. ;-)

  • Wata

    It’s not on iTunes because their fans don’t own computers. Their fans will most likely see the album next to a Snickers at the Wal-Mart checkout.

  • gnarlk

    @sammy:
    lies! damn you! lies!
    next thing you’ll tell me that there are only 2 songs with “rock” in the titles

  • DemonicLemming

    Full albums for the mother fucking win. I can’t count the number of times I picked up an album for one or two specific songs, only to find out that the rest of the album was even better.

    Now, mediating that, there are plenty of bands with only two or three good songs on a cd. That’s where my music player comes in – I can pick those two or three good songs, listen to those, and none of the rest from the album.

    However, I think it goes to say that everyone has albums where they like the majority of the songs, and can deal with the few on there they don’t like because there are so many good songs. The whole iTunes trend, hell, the entire radio singles trend, has done absolutely nothing but cause people’s musical library to become stagnant with the trendy singles that get played for 2 weeks, then never listened to again. No one has any musical breadth any more because they never try anything new. Non-radio singles on a cd? Hell, to the iTunes generation, why even have them? You don’t need to sample the rest of an artist’s album to see if maybe there’s something else on there you like – just get the one song you know you like and leave it at that. People know absolutely shit about the musical world now because they don’t need to – they don’t have to buy a full cd to get the one single they like.

    On top of iTunes having absolutely donkey-blowing sound quality (yes, the majority of my musical collection is FLAC, lossless wav, or other very-high quality formats, fuck anything with less than 192kbs and it takes 320 to get my toes tingling) and the “zomg I get single only!” mindset now, yeah, I do think the whole iTunes trend is going to destroy music as a major cultural point. We’ve already seen how mp3 and digital releases have basically rendered hard copies and things like album art irrelevant to all but a few die-hards (and while I like album art and having lyrics pages, it’s nothing I can’t get using a quick google search), how people love having ungodly loud and unmusical music vs more dynamic, less ear-bleed-inducing volume music, so why should the death of the full album and furthermore, the death of high-quality sound surprise anyone? Why should we be surprised that people call an album like the acoustic Walls of Jericho album “pointless and misguided” when their own musical knowledge is limited to the singles they own, and therefore their absolute inability to recognize similarities between highly different forms of music gives them no reason to call anything “misguided”?

    To end my multiple-topic spanning ranting diatribe, AC/DC is on the right side of the fence on the issue, just for the wrong reasons. The full album is dead, sound quality in music is dead, musical knowledge is dead, and the desire to expand one’s musical palette is dead (although that’s propagated by the “If it’s not metal/rock/rap/Christian gospel music/country, it sucks and I’m not going to listen to it!” crowd of retards.

  • Sammy

    @Demonic: While I appreciate your diatribe, if you think iTunes is the originator of the stagnation of musical libraries and a 2-week attention span, you’re horribly mistaken. I’m older than most of the commentors on these pages, and the 45 RMP vinyl single, which drove the music industry, was around before I was born. The culture of Top 40 radio spinning a popular record to death and then discarding it a month later is as old as rock and roll has existed. Single cassettes followed and singles on small CDs followed them. iTunes is just a new incarnation of an age-old practice. Ever since the days of Chuck Berry and and the ’50s jukebox, the pop music attention span has been ADD.

  • bob saget

    people still pay for music?

  • key

    itunes screws people over. I don’t care what reason they have for not using it, not lining steve job’s pocket is fine by me. artists see shit from those sales even they sell well. apple is just as bad as the record industry as far as i’m concerned. yea, they’re saving the earth by not producing cd’s but they use electricity–slurping servers and the money doesn’t get anywhere near the artist. And paying for music with drm? yea, they removed it on some songs but still, i’ll stick to my physical albums.

    and if you want to talk about putting out the same cd every so often, please look at motorhead. not that i don’t eat it up, it’s just all realllllly similar.

  • DemonicLemming

    @Sammy: I don’t think iTunes really originated the whole “zomg single!” thing, it has made them much, much easier to get without having to listen to other songs by the same band. While you didn’t *have* to listen to all the songs before your favorite one on a particular cassette, maybe one day you’d be too lazy to fast forward and go “Holy fucking shit, I didn’t know this band had more than one song I could like! And fuck a goat, that riff sounds like something Black Sabbath would have done! Wow, I didn’t realize this band got cues from other bands!”

    Conversely, things like Pandora, last.fm, and Amazon have made it easier for people who want to expand their musical library and taste based on specific bands they like. While sometimes they’re a bit screwy (I got Otep 3 songs after Epica once), Pandora and last.fm work pretty well. Amazon is great because I can start with Leaves’ Eyes, and at one end, wind up at Turisas, and at the other, end up at something like Spiral Architect. iTunes has – finally – stepped up to the plate to compete in that area, but from what I’ve seen, their new system isn’t that great, requires that you use more proprietary Apple bullshit (obligatory fuck Apple moment), and the SQ is shit (I use foobar 2k with an AISO plugin).

    Maybe it’s because I have both a huge music library, and a huge book library, but I honestly can’t understand why someone wouldn’t want to sample different genres based on similarities between new stuff, and stuff they already like. If I had never branched out in metal, I wouldn’t have anything but thrash Metallica, Slayer, and Megadeth in my collection right now, but as it is, just about every single genre, sub-genre, and imaginary genre of metal is covered, along with just about every type of music other than rap, reggae, country and bluegrass (although modern country really isn’t anything but pop of a slightly different flavor anymore….Johnny Cash And Hank Williams Jr. and the like were real country giants and I’m not embarrassed to have some of that classical country in my collection) in my little digital box of noise. Why anyone would want to stay in the little trench of one particular brand of music, I don’t know, but all it implies to me is a small mind, limited imagination, and a sheep-like desire to follow the trend. Sorta like iTards.

    /second rambling discourse on various stuff

  • jay

    What the F is up with the punk rock channel on sirius? They’ve been fucking playing nothing but AC/DC for the last week and a half.

  • lern2swim

    There’s nothing wrong with people listening to music however they want. I do have a huge problem with this mindset that a band HAS to release their album/songs on itunes. That is fucking bullshit. I am all for digital distribution and the new forms of music release. I don’t however think itunes is the end all of the future of music. It’s merely the one that has been adopted most easily by the stupid majority. Personally, I look to the examples set by NIN and Radiohead when I think of where the future of music lies. I don’t, however, see the point in giving any band shit for doing with their releases what they want. The biggest benefit of becoming a hugely popular band should be that they can then use that advantage to do with their art exactly what they want. Many bands miss that mark but fuck anyone who has a problem with it when they don’t

  • http://www.wvvy.org ezra

    Actually, there’s FOUR songs with “rock” in the title!

  • http://www.myspace.com/joefey Edward Wilfred

    I do think that our culture doesn’t appreciate whole albums anymore. I think that’s a shame. I don’t think that bands have any right to dictate how we listen to their music, however.

    I personally always download the whole slbum because I have moderate OCD so holes in my collection bother the shit out of me. Also, if I really love a band, I’ll want to have every song they have!

  • Dr J

    You can sell albums on itunes as album only. The excuses they make are horse shit, they want that green. Same with Tool; too “artistic” to put albums on itunes, but hey, whats that? Tool is appearing in Guitar Hero?

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  • http://www.djmedi4.com djmedi4

    got the record.

    15 tunes.

    3 good tunes.

    12 filler songs.

    3 songs with the word “rock” in the title.

    still thinking more is more.

    stupid move on their part.

    should have partnered with Amazon, and released on all platforms.

    but, as BL mentions, why would this band change? they don’t need to, or care to.

    soon to managed by Azoff, I’m sure (just to keep it ancient school).

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  • http://www.myspace.com/justinsmyspaceurl llghoulj

    Im sure this cd sucks anyways