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).

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!

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

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.

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.