First question - will the songs and the extra content have DRM on them? If so, then it won't make it worth buying, no matter what "added value" you think you've put into it.

Second question - who would sit around with their friends looking at album art on a monitor? It was one thing when you could pass the album cover from person to person, read the notes and lyrics, pull the sleeves and look at the art on them. Now we would have to huddle arounf the computer, no hands on. It still lacks the tactile aspect. Interactive it may be, but only for the one holding the mouse.

Third question - does this mean you're going to improve the music quality on the albums? Can we expect more than one good track now? (Okay, I know that's two, but they really adress the same concept.)

Fourth question - why am I wasting my time on these questions? ;^)

Of course back in the day when people bought the whole album there was a whole album of good music. Now you get one maybe two good songs and the rest is filler you will listen to but once. Bring back albums that took time and therefore had quality and people with buy them.

they already did this by making tracks 1.29. but maybe it would help if artists made all their songs great. i really regret buying that Baha Men cd for just "who let the dogs out".

I like digital downloads for the ability to get only what I want. Instead of having to buy a half dozen songs that I don't like, just for the one I do.

What makes digital downloads great is that you don't have to buy ten crappy songs to get the two you like. Newsflash to the labels: people aren't buying the albums because nobody wants to pay for the filler crap that you used to force feed us.

Once again, record labels out of touch. So surprised.

As for me, whenever I buy a CD (yes, I still like to have the flexibility of ripping my own mp3's), I store the CD and throw away all the stuff that they say makes their retarded cocktails great. Idiots.

Wow, talk about something I will not buy. At best I am willing to shell out for a "greatest hits" album that has a few songs I want.

This is as awesome as iTunes recommending a whack load of songs in a genre that mostly suck and asking you to buy them all in one shot at no discount...

Want me to buy more songs? Offer me a bulk discount if I blow $20+ in one shot that scales proportionally.

Greatest Hits albums are the only full albums worth buying really. Guess what record companies: the game has changed. Stop trying to push your old business models at us, they really aren't working anymore.

This is the last nail in the coffin. I will never pay for another song from this point forward. There is nothing that the record companies, nor Apple, could give with full albums that would ever provoke me to purchase them. Unless there is a worthwhile artist, along with a record company, that is will to sell full albums will nothing but great songs, I will never change my mind.

My guess is, these record companies will work towards forcing us to always purchase the whole digital album, as it was in the past.

I don't think the album is a label thing, i think its more a musician thing. I prefer albums to singles, I usually find that my favorite song on an album isn't a single or played on the radio at all. if you only like one or two of the songs on an album, then you probably don't really like the artist, or they are just not really that good, probably very manufactured / one hit wonder style.

I think its a good idea to really bundle the songs up and offer special extras with the album, make it look like a single purchase rather than just a list of single song purchases

As you f$%@ing should!

Album or song, if it's not in FLAC format, I'm not paying for it no matter what, or who sells it.

The only albums i buy these days are ministry of sound albums the rest I just DL

I usually tend to only buy songs in album forms, so this isn't something interesting.

$10 for an album, much cheaper than where I can get it from a local store and is DRM free and it's already in AAC, not in the outdated MP3 format which is good.

itunes is in AAC and DRM free and you're taxed for it through a retail store.

With Itunes etc, artists don't need the record companies anymore... how about them earning $.71 per track sold, instead of them getting about $.20 per CD sold? and that's *after* Apple's share and the aggregator's share...

Gimme CD's anyday. Apple, your goose is already cooked as far as I go. I'm not buying your proprietary, over-compressed crap anymore.

If the whole album has good music, I buy the whole album, whether CD or MP3. Although the nice thing about digital files is that DRM is finally waning, and you can just get the songs you want.

But with Amazon's sales, even if only 3 or 4 songs are good, I often buy the whole album. They are pushing album sales harder than ANY of the yayhoos listed in this article....

And why exactly is MP3 outdated? AAC is great for 5.1 but for stereo MP3 is great. It's supported by every digital music player, no matter how obscure everything will play an mp3 and not complain about it. You would be hard pressed to distinguish the difference between a 192k MP3 and any other format in therms of quality.
Also the number of gain, normalization, waveform, ID3, general manipulation tools for MP3s make MP3 currently most desirable format for stereo audio.

Anyone talking about there only being a couple good songs per album should consider listening to better bands.

Already, like everyone else is saying... People are buying 1 song at a time because it's what they want. Sell a product that people want and they will buy it. It's simple logic. And, what do people want? Duh, to buy the songs they want!!!!! Why are they not listening?

According to the church of Steve Jobs, another person's life is worth a MacBook. His own life, however,is worth a lot of anonymous donations to a certain Methodist Hospital in Memphis, TN.

BOYCOTT APPLE!

Seems they miss the money they get from full album sales. It isn't enough to have a record store in every household. Now they want you to buy crap you don't need so you can make their wallets fatter. Maybe they should just get the bands to make one song and only one song so they won't waste precious studio time (write off) and not make the other nine songs of filler that nobody wants to listen to.

All record companies take note. The game has changed. We now only want to buy single songs that make us happy. Why don't you just accept it and take your albums and shove them up your fat greedy...

Or...you could charge by the minute and make a medley of ten shitty songs and string them all together to force the public into buying a really terrible thirty dollar song. Oh wait. Did I say THIRTY dollars a pop? Who wants to bet they try to do this! I bet you $1.29 they will!!! GREEEEEEED!

mp3 is not a very good format from a quality perspective but then, hardly anyone uses a quality player or headset anyway... i still would prefer a format with higher fidelity either way. compression always makes a copy sound worse than the original!

The format has very little to do with quality. The golden rule of audio\video is garbage in garbage out. The vast majority of music we all hear is trash it sounds good due to filtering and sound blending. even the majority of off the shelf cd's are only 128x2 and unlike 10 years ago where it was a analog to digital convert to cd its digital all the way witch is good in some ways but very bad in others. if you are a pop,rap, or rnb person you are not missing anything. for the rest of us that enjoy music made with instruments the affect known and cliping becomes a problem it makes the music cold and dry its something that you cant get away from in modern music and that is why i refuse to pay for it. flac and ogg do alright there range number of waveforms per channel is ok. realy if you want to argue about quality if its not flac or ogg its garbage and even then its only ok if you want true quality of sound get your self a good record player player and some lp's digital music and photo is in no way better then the analog its just smaller and easy.

If the music industry want to make again the same money they got with "with or without you", "new sensation", "Final countdown ", and "moonlight shadow", they need to sell NEW, SAME-QUALITY songs.

Not another rap, please...

I simply don't have the money to go buying the whole album for every individual track I buy. And, as already mentioned, most of the music on albums are not that great and/or filler material. If an album truely is great all the way through (or enough so that it is cheaper to buy the album than the individual tracks) then I will buy the full album

Considering most of the albums I buy I get off of Amazon used for < $5 including shipping, who cares?

Times change, maybe the RIAA and Music Industry should learn to change with it before everything they had is gone. Welcome to middle class you pricks.

And who will pay for the recording studio, mixing and mastering? Who will promote the album to radios and public?
Perhaps if you're doing rap, techno or other stuff which is just electronic music (you need only a tracker+samples/synth) with or even without voice. For some real instruments the things get a lot more complicated (read expensive).

While I don't think record companies are by any means fair with their compensation, I will still tend to agree with Martel. People need to have a little better understanding of how business works before automatically flaming any business decision made by the record companies. As for all the negativity:

A) I wouldn't call this business plan greed; their is no extortion, they aren't forcing a new model until us, we can still buy the single tracks if we want. If I go to your art store to buy a painting, and I end up walking out of there with three, I'm not going to call it greedy. I'm going to call it good business.

B) While there MAY be pressure from record companies to push out more tracks(How do YOU know? Are you signed on a major record label?), it's ultimately the artists fault for making only one good song. Listen to The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists from start to finish. That's the way a record should be.

there is no extortion** -__-