Re: What does it mean to you, to "release a record"?

["Per Boysen" <perboysen@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 1:26 PM, Warren Sirota <wsirota@wsdesigns.com> 
wrote:
> That's good information Per (I especially like the comment about the
> unrecallability of anything you put out - I'm still getting occasional
> inquiries about a program I put out in 1995 that became useless in 
>1997!),
> but there's another question implied here: why release an "album" at all?


Very good point for further discussion! I left out all of that in my
post, but my view is that may you chose to release music digitally,
online, "as an album" if these tracks do have something in common or
may serve an artistic statement if listened to, or thought of, as a
group of musical pieces presented in this particular order.

There is also the marketing aspect to releasing "a digital album". In
the old days a physical album was the product to market. The artist,
looked at as a brand, was just a tool, a strategy to sell the product.
Over time this changed to put more of the focus on branding the
artist. In digital, the artist branding aspect is becoming more
important in a release, meaning "the artist as a brand" actually is
the product rather than "the recently recorded music". Here we find
that a certain selection of recordings presented in a certain order
may give the best presentation of the artist, and that leads us back
to the album format again.

Finally, we also have to look at musical recordings along the axis
that goes from "the recording as the final piece of art" (as in film
soundtracks) to "a viable representation of the artistic performance".
Depending on where you put your own activities on that axis, you may
take a different view on all this.

Excited to hear what other list members think about grouping releases
"as albums" also in a digital online format.

Per