A Discussion Of Track Listing (I)

I'll begin this discussion post by offering two case studies of track listing: Coldplay's Mylo Xyloto and Paul Westerberg's 49:00

Mylo Xyloto tracks:

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Mylo Xyloto"	0:42
2.	"Hurts Like Heaven"	4:02
3.	"Paradise"	4:38
4.	"Charlie Brown"	4:45
5.	"Us Against the World"	4:00
6.	"M.M.I.X."	0:48
7.	"Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall"	4:01
8.	"Major Minus"	3:30
9.	"U.F.O."	2:18
10.	"Princess of China" (featuring Rihanna)	3:58
11.	"Up in Flames"	3:13
12.	"A Hopeful Transmission"	0:33
13.	"Don't Let It Break Your Heart"	3:54
14.	"Up with the Birds"	3:46

(via Wikipedia)

49:00 tracks:

(No official track-listing - 10-15 songs as a single .mp3 film)

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With the advent of the Internet era, track listing is a something that artists are really beginning to struggle with. Traditionally—with records and CDs—artists experienced a kind of physical restriction or limitation on what they could do with their albums, particularly in terms of length. They were allotted usually something around 40 minutes to a single record/album and, in the case of popular music artists (overlooking jazz and classical music), divided that space into a series of distinct songs. [There are, of course, exceptions to every arbitrary, simplistic law I draw up for anything on this blog and I’m sure some of you would be quick to pull out examples (What about the Beatles medleys? What about the entire vinyl side of “Mountain Jam”?).]

Anyways, I doubt that anyone out there would hesitate to admit to the sheer power the Internet has exerted on musicians’ conception of the traditional “album.” That’s not to say that everything about the album is suddenly different now that we’re frolicking in the Internet era; the reality, of course, is that most artists follow the same album formula as before. But just because that formula is still generally followed doesn’t meant that musicians (or, more importantly, the recording companies) aren’t shifting their focus.

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Indeed, it saddens me to think that the definite heyday of the album is, more or less, officially over. At one point it would have been commercially permissible—even encouraged—to put together and polish a complex, long-winded concept album in the vein of Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd. (If there are disagreeing parties out there as to the unbelievable success of those artists' albums, I’d only point to Dark Side Of The Moon’s 741-week presence on the charts and presence on every best-selling-of-all-time list ever made.) Thanks to the burgeoning .mp3 download market—especially in connection with portable .mp3 devices and ever more transportable forms of digital music—commercial concerns have been somewhat revamped around the power of a few singles off an album.

That’s not to say that this hasn’t been the focus of musicians in the past; there have, of course, been countless acts over the past half-century in music that have relied on the power of singles to move albums. I will readily admit that the idea is nothing new…but rather point to the application of that idea as having attained a drastic new high. I realize that this argument still sounds contentious, but I realy mean my argument to focus not so much on the nature or presence of singles, but rather on the formation of the album as a whole—i.e. we don’t have any multiple mainstream musical acts pursuing grand visions quite the way we saw before the Internet.

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Perhaps my historical and theoretical understandings of popular music trends in the U.S. could stand some revising, but I think that as a general notion, it somewhat holds together and, either way, it serves to lead this discussion back to its actual concern: the practice of track listings. Faced by the economic realities of a world that often separates songs (as .mp3s or other music files) out of their context within an album, it becomes a fascinating issue to watch how the music industry deals with track listings. For instance, it’s common enough to see longer tracks (usually 8+ minutes) on iTunes listed as “Album Only” such that the songs cannot be purchased as separate tracks. While there is certainly a sense of the song being “worth more” than just 99¢, I think there is also an issue of the track being central to the album and not simply a track capable of being separate unto itself.

One song that comes to mind in following with this example is The Fiery Furnaces’ “Quay Cur”—the 11-minute dose of musical schizophrenia that opens their album Blueberry Boat—which actually contains several songs within its somewhat unclear framework.

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Looking back to the Internet’s influence, I think that the Internet has created an essential polarity in how musicians play with track listing—pulled back and forth between the choices made by Coldplay and Paul Westerberg on those track listings you see above. 

So what is that central dichotomy? (Check in with Part II later this week!)