Apple

Jermaine Dupri: We made iTunes, not Apple; no more singles, buy albums or we ll take them away! “Some people find it hard to understand my man Jay-Z’s decision not to let iTunes break up his American Gangster album and sell it as single tracks. They say he’s fighting the future and losing out on sales from fans who only want to download singles. But I say it was a stand somebody had to take in the music industry.

Jay is speaking for all of us,” Jermaine Dupri, president of Island Urban Records, blogs for The Huffington Post. MacDailyNews Take: The album is an artificial construct developed by the music cartels to get more of your money for less effort. The album is - plain and simple - a bundling technique. Take some marketable material, add a greater percentage of filler, call it an “album,” pretend it’s “art,” and charge more than you could charge for just the worthwhile bits.

While some small percentage of artists throughout the history of the album construct have taken the concept to an art form and more than few music customers have bought so fully into the marketing construct as to defend it passionately today, that does not change the fact that the “album” is a product bundle designed to collect more money for the good stuff by bundling it with a greater percentage of filler. Originally, human beings did not sit around the fire singing “albums,” they sang songs.

When the music industry began, they sold single songs, too. The “album” is a marketing tool that the music labels developed later. Is it “art” that an album is between 30-60 minutes? No, that length is based on nothing more than how much the recording mediums could hold at the time the artificial “album” construct began to be marketed.