Vinyl sales prove it: The album gets its groove back

February 24, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

By GLENN GAMBOA

NEW YORK — Don’t bury the album just yet.

Yes, it’s struggling, with album sales down by half since the historical high it set in 2000 — sales dropped another 8.5 percent in 2009 to 489.8 million, even as overall music sales climbed 2.1 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Album-buying havens, such as the Virgin Megastores and the Tower Records chains, vanished, and music industry and technology leaders have been trumpeting what they see as the more attractive profit margins of single sales and $1.29-a-pop downloading for years.

That death knell sure is getting pretty loud. Or maybe it’s just a wake-up call.

Britt Daniel — whose band, the indie-rockers Spoon, recently enjoyed commercial success with its first Top 5 album “Transference” — says, regardless of industry hype, the album will continue to validate both artists and music fans.

“It’s certainly the test of a band’s mettle,” says Daniel, whose critical success was cemented when Spoon was named Artist of the Decade by Metacritic for the Austin, Texas, band’s consistently praised albums in the 2000s. “It’s hard to make an album’s worth of songs and do it well. The ones that do occupy a higher place in mind and in psyche. ... Live shows can be wild and fun, life-changing if done really well. But a great album has always meant the most to me.

“Albums are what fans get into when they really get serious about a band,” Daniel continues. “That’s when they are finding something that means something to them, something that they feel is worth spending time with, that they will get to know what an album really is by listening the whole way through. Until they do that, they’re just a casual listener, not the most passionate fan.”

Daniel isn’t alone in his vocal defense of the album. More and more artists and fans are banding together to support the album as an art form and as a way to distribute music. Independent record stores around the country have united to create Record Store Day, which takes place April 17, to “celebrate the art of music.” Digital retailer eMusic has launched an “Embrace the Album” campaign on Facebook and Twitter, as a “place to highlight records that are best consumed whole.”

“I do think there’s still value in 11 great songs packaged together, flowing from start to finish,” says J. Edward Keyes, eMusic’s editor-in-chief (and an occasional Newsday contributor). “I think that’s a testament to an artist’s time and vision, and those are the kinds of things that will be a longer relationship. Marvin Gaye had a string of great pop singles, but ‘What’s Goin’ On,’ the album, is what people respond to. The Beach Boys had a string of unbeatable pop singles, but ‘Pet Sounds’ is what set them apart.”

These campaigns may be having some effect. Though it’s still a small fraction of the overall market, vinyl album sales were up 33 percent last year, to 2.5 million, the highest sales level since SoundScan started keeping records in 1991. And eMusic reports that about 72 percent of its sales are full albums.

Spoon’s Daniel says artists get energized by crafting albums for that kind of audience. Even after completing the recording, artists take a great deal of care in sequencing, deciding what order works best.

All of it was in mind when Daniel was working on “Transference.” “I just wanted it to feel like something like all of our records and have it take some left turns that you weren’t expecting,” he says. “What I hope you will find is that it hangs together.”