Jim Root: laments the demise of the humble album

Jim Root:

Oh yeah. It absolutely has become that. It's almost reminiscent of when rock ‘n' roll first started getting spun in the Fifties. Everything was single-based, nobody cared about records until bands like THE BEATLES, THE WHO and LED ZEPPELIN, PINK FLOYD, too, of course, started experimenting with making full-length records. It's kind of a weird evolution, because in some ways we've been seeing things going down the toilet. It makes it harder, because it trickles down to everything: it doesn't just affect record labels and bands, it affects the people who drive buses for bands, the hotels that the bands book into, it effects the entire economy of the music industry. It's already started affecting touring, the only place a band can make any money at all anymore is by touring. That's part of the reason that I haven't come off the road in the last 11 years. And now you're going to have every band in the world, even if they're successful on radio or successful in the pop world, having to hit the road in order to make money. They're not making any money from publishing, and they're not making any money from selling records, so they have no choice. And what you'll see from that is such an over-saturation of every band, y'know, touring bands might be playing in your city on any given night, all fighting to pay their mortgages, I guess! (laughs) You can certainly see it that way. It goes pretty deep, and it's not just that… The culture of buying an album on CD or vinyl has gone out of the window. A lot of kids don't really understand that, they just hop onto Limewire, or find a BitTorrent, or even just go onto iTunes if they're going to pay for something. It's just right there, there's no searching about. No talking to the old crusty guy who runs the mom-and-pop record shop, "If you like this, this guy played guitar on this album, at this time…" There's no studying the album artwork, or finding out where it was recorded at, who produced it, or how the album artwork was put together. There are many different artforms that are just being lost because the whole digital revolution has homogenized everything, turned it all into Walmart. (laughs) It's a little bit sad. full

You know he's so right!