One of the dumbest things I’ve ever read

Speaking of toolbags, I just read a post by Jermaine Dupri called A Good Album is More than Just a Collection of Singles. It is so wrong, backwards, and stupid, I don’t even know where to begin.

The man does not argue coherently. Fortunately the post was at least copy-edited, because the punctuation is by and large orderly, but sadly it doesn’t look like a logician was brought in for consultation, which would have been a fantastic idea. This rant shows so very clearly why the record company empires are crumbling. He’s absolutely clueless.

These days people just assume that you need a number one single to have a number one album. But look at what’s really happening. Soulja Boy sold almost 4 million singles and only 300,000 albums! We let the consumer have too much of what they want, too soon, and we hurt ourselves. [emphasis added]

That’s right, instead of delivering a better product now that consumers are empowered enough to shop for what they want, the chosen course of action is to try to bully them into buying second- and third-rate complements along with the desired item. You call that smart business? Remember, we’re not talking CostCo bulk rates here, because an album varies notoriously in the quality of its tracks, not its quantity. It doesn’t become cheaper for the consumer to buy lots of music (although perhaps it should). The ability to buy singles just means that people are only paying for what they wanted all along: one track, because the rest of your CD sucked.

Yeah, it’s about the money, but it’s also about quality. Creating each album as a body of work that means something gives the consumer something better to listen to, It’s that simple. [sic]

OK, so much for the decent copy-editing. Here Jermaine seems to be saying that he knows what I want to hear better than I do, and that pisses me off.

Asking us to let other people mess with all our hard work like that is disrespectful. It’s like when you go an art auction, and an Andy Warhol painting is up for sale at $5 million, but a buyer is allowed to just by off the top right hand corner of the canvas for a hundred thou’

Apple, why are you helping the consumer destroy our canvas? We don’t tell you to break up your computers into bits and pieces and sell off each thing. When you go to the Apple store you may only need one thing, but you have to buy all their plug ins and stuff. You have to buy their whole package, even if you don’t necessarily want it, or your equipment won’t work.

This one really blew me out of the water. It’s really a horrible way to make a point. I understand that he’s saying the producers should be able to make the product anyway they want, and also simultaneously control the delivery of that product as well. Good for him. But using Apple as an example? They are practically the only computer business on the planet that isn’t friendly to customization according to customer specifications. Go to Dell, you pick and choose components. Better yet, go to Newegg, where you can buy just a hard drive, or a graphics card, or a mouse, or a monitor. That’s what I do!

So maybe a better analogy would be that the iTunes Music Store is to Newegg as Wal-Mart’s music section is to computer sales at Apple retail locations.

Additionally, the claim that an album experienced track by track “won’t work” is nonsense. In the article he compares CDs to books, saying book publishers don’t allow bookstores to break up books and sell them by the chapter. Well, that sure is the Old Media way of looking at these things, isn’t it? Last time I checked this century, the rules of New Media do indeed allow such discrete consumption. Take a look at this blog post, and even at his, for example of that delivery style. And when’s the last time you heard an entire CD on the radio? Probably around the same time you heard an entire book read there.

Sadly I haven’t been able to find much mainstream coverage of this article (it’s all over Technorati, of course), but Mashable has an excellent write-up.

Aside from a shocking lack of understanding when it comes to how an actual iPod works, it is also clear he missed the entire point as to why iTunes came into existence in the first place: piracy. Jermaine appears to think that if you simply stop selling music by way of iTunes, everyone will run back to the CD format with open arms, and never make an ‘illegal copy’ ever again. It is as if he missed most of the ’90s and never heard of Napster.

Thank you for saying it so well.

I must say, though, that I do agree with the fundamental claim of the original post: that a good album is more than just a collection of singles. It’s just too bad Jermaine’s in the business of quantity assurance.