Fans favour single tracks over the full experience

THE end is nigh - again. This time it's not the end of the high-street record shop or the traditional record company. For a change it's the end of the album itself.

Yes, we've been here before with the "it's the end of the album as we know it" prediction, first with Napster and then many times since as the digitisation of music began to take hold.

This time, though, it's serious (no, really). The latest figures for album sales in the most important musical territory in the world, the US, show that physical CD sales are falling fast - and where the US leads (as in many things), we all follow.

Researcher Nielsen Soundscan has published figures that show CD sales in the US have fallen by about 20 per cent in the last year. In the first three months of 2006, 112 million albums were sold. In the first three months of this year, that figure was down to 89 million.

The received wisdom is that the industry always factored in a drop in physical album sales, but believed that loss would be offset by a corresponding rise in digital album sales (from iTunes etc).

Digital music sales have increased, but not the way the industry wants them to. Instead of buying albums online, more people are opting for the individual download option. In the first three months of 2006, 242 million individual tracks were purchased; in the first three months of this year, 288 million tracks were downloaded.

Whatever your feelings about iTunes and other similar sites, they do free the consumer from the tyranny of having to buy a whole album when they really only want three or four songs off it. You hear of bands really sweating over the song sequence of an album, believing their work to be a "complete experience", but the reality is that even on the best-selling (and best-reviewed) albums there's still an awful lot of filler. Now that people have a way to avoid the detritus, they're exercising that right.

The big buzz phrase in record company boardrooms is "the album is inimical to the Internet". The labels, instead of offering the traditional five-album deal, are now signing bands for a singles-only deal. If the singles perform, they get an album deal; if they don't, they're dropped.

iTunes is already on top of this changing consumer trend. To try to push people back into buying albums, it has advanced plans to begin crediting the sales of individual tracks. As it stands, if you buy a single track and are impressed enough to go back and buy the whole album, you're essentially paying for the same track twice.

Under the new system (expected to be launched shortly), you will be charged only for the other songs on the album, not the one (or two, or three) that you have already purchased.

The thing here is that when big companies start giving away things for free and/or crediting previous sales, it's because they're concerned about sales losses and, in this case, concerned enough to offer a type of refund.

Certain album-centric bands (the likes of Radiohead and Arcade Fire) will always be immune from the drift towards individual purchases. But the genres really suffering at the moment are pop and r'n'b, where it really is a case of tracks being flung on the album to quite literally make up the numbers. Bye bye album, hello downloading only the two best songs.