One off the buzziest bees in the Minister’s bonnet at the moment – touched upon in my Jonathan Coulton post – is the whining of record labels and their mates in the meeja about how nobody is making any money anymore because of thieving scallywag downloaders and their love of free music.

Even the ordinarily redoubtable Miranda Sawyer missed the point about the public’s new found reluctance to pay for music in her article in February’s Observer Music Monthly.  However much record labels plead poverty, Sawyer’s own Observer article two weeks previously had quoted head of Polydor David Joseph pointing out:

“[I]n the UK last year… 140 million CDs were sold.”

If the average retail price of a CD is £8, that’s £1,120,000,000 in annual CD sales from our little island alone.  Add in sales revenue from the other 5.94 billion people on the planet and you’re almost talking about real money…

I have empathy with performers, songwriters and producers: they unequivocally deserve to be rewarded properly for their talents and, like everyone else, they should not have to tolerate the exploitation of their efforts.  Musicians’ Union research claims that the 90% of British professional musicians earn less than £15,000 a year.

Perhaps if the public – fleeced for decades by suits with fat expense accounts to feed (the very first CD I bought, on 17 October 1986, cost the 15-year-old Minister £14.99) – felt that the majority of their cash actually ended up in the pockets of the talent rather than the record label suits and the shareholders of multinational retailers, they might be more inclined to cough up.

People don’t want to pay more than a couple of quid for albums because most are padded out with sub-par filler of interest to nobody but completists.  The Album was born out of 60-year-old technology: one piece of 12-inch vinyl, holding a maximum of 23 minutes’ music on each side.

Despite successive technological innovations, the artificial construct that is the 45-minute album has prevailed because the music industry has been able to print money by re-packaging and re-selling the best back catalogues (God knows how many people – myself included – have bought Beatles albums time and again on vinyl, cassette and CD; still more – myself included – will buy them again as a re-mastered digital download) and occasionally chancing upon someone to make the cash registers ring for a couple of years.

While the planet occasionally throws up exceptional talents who can fill a succession of albums bursting at the seams with brilliance, the prosaic fact is that many of the greatest albums ever released contain filler tracks – and the overwhelming majority of albums fall far short of greatness.

The world is a richer place for Revolver’s 35 minutes, but can anybody claim with a straight face that The White Album (and yes, I know its title is The Beatles) would not be a better album if it had been pared back to one piece of vinyl?

How many of us now listen to entire albums from start to finish?  Given that digitisation has made it so easy for us to listen to what we want, when we want – and nothing more, unless we feel so inclined – how many of us sit through the entirety of Good Morning, Good Morning when A Day In The Life is waiting a click away?

If anything, the album’s continued dominance in recent years has exacerbated the downwards spiral of the album’s artistic worth.  Standard audio CDs can hold 80 minutes of music and artists and labels seem to think think they must cram every sector full of zeros and ones.  Albums now routinely run to 15 or more tracks when most artists can barely command their audience’s attention for more than three or four songs in succession.

Mary J. Blige may be one of those rare individuals who could sing the telephone directory and make it sound good, but her current album Growing Pains weighs in at 16 tracks and her last, The Breakthrough, contained an earache-inducing 18 – both are twice the length they should be.

Even genuinely classic albums can be turned into shiny Frisbees by the suits so wedded to their modus operandi: by all means re-master Rumours, Time Warner, but did the world really need the second disc of alternate versions that Fleetwood Mac rejected in 1977 for a reason?

As previously quoted in these pages, the recently deceased Atlantic Records producer Joel Dorn said:

“You make a record tomorrow that makes you feel like a Marvin Gaye record did 30 years ago, I don’t give a fuck how bad the economy is: people will buy that record.”

As with film studios, record labels grew complacent and bloated operating for decades on a scattergun approach that meant they inevitably happened across the occasional cash cow that would pay for their follies and excesses.  Until now they have not been forced to examine their business plan.  Now they have, and they’ve been found wanting.

Quality will always prevail over quantity.