[~digs] In a sign of how insignificant new albums have become in today’s music industry,...

~digs — 7/23/2015 1:09:39 AM

In a sign of how insignificant new albums have become in today’s music industry, rock band Wilco Thursday evening surprised fans by releasing their latest studio album without fanfare, even offering it for free on its website.

“Star Wars” is the Chicago-based group’s first album of new material since 2011’s, “The Whole Love.” It came as a surprise partly because for the past year, Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy has focused on a side project, Tweedy, with his son, Spencer. They released an album, “Sukierae,” last September.

The surprise album release has become something of an institution in the music industry—even a promotional device.

Beyoncé famously dropped her titular 2013 album without notice. Last December, R&B singer D’Angelo did the same—even though he was releasing his first material in 14 years. In February, Drake surprise-dropped “If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late.” Even back in 2011, Radiohead suddenly announced their next album, “The King of Limbs,” would be out imminently.

The popularity of the surprise album release—and Wilco’s decision to offer theirs for free—shows how much less album releases matter to many major artists relative to touring and other revenue streams.

For decades, the album release was the industry’s marquee event. Record labels deployed massive resources to build up anticipation among fans. On September 17, 1991, throngs of fans lined up outside Tower Records stores in Los Angeles and New York at midnight, waiting to buy copies of Guns N’ Roses’ “Use Your Illusion” albums.

At the time, high-level artists toured the world to promote albums; making money from touring was a secondary consideration.

But the digital revolution hurt the album as a source of revenue for artists and the industry. File-sharing begat piracy. The advent of the single-track download, popularized by Apple Inc.’s iTunes store in 2003, effectively undermined albums: Casual music fans no longer needed to buy an entire album for $15.99 to get a song or two. Record sales plunged.

Today, live performances, not albums, are the industry’s lifeblood. The top 100 North American tours generated some $1.4 billion in gross ticketing revenue in the first half of 2015, up about $400 million from the same period last year, according to the trade publication Pollstar. Ticket prices have skyrocketed: the average ticket price has hit an all-time high of $76.20, up nearly 13% from the middle of 2014.

Of course, album sales remain a huge deal for the world’s biggest artists. Taylor Swift sought to protect sales of her latest album, “1989,” which is the fastest-selling album in over a decade—racking up 5 million in U.S. sales as of July. But for acts such as Wilco, whose albums sell well but aren’t massive industry blockbusters, touring is the bigger part of the equation.

Surprise releases present something of a dilemma for music critics—who scrambled late Thursday to offer quick-hit assessments of Wilco’s album, which is available for free for a limited time on its wilcoworld.net website.

blogs.wsj.com

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[~digs] In a sign of how insignificant new albums have become in today’s music industry,...