Today the music industry announced that for the first time half of it's profits are now generated by downloads and streaming. While it's good to see the industry adapting to new ways of listening to music, from an aesthetic point of view this is a worry for three reasons: firstly, even though sales of vinyl in particular have seen a boost in the last few years, physical sales continue to decline - if streaming and downloads continue to grow, surely vinyl will suffer in the end - and this means the slow death of visual art in popular music; secondly, with an increasing number of micro-transactions from downloads, and streaming of bits and pieces, the concept of the long player - a collection of songs that made an album from beginning to end - is seen as less important, to the detriment of popular music as an art form; and thirdly with all these nasty (!) little portable devices people download and/or stream music from these days, even the tonal quality of popular music is being undermined, a good example being the frankly horrible 'iTunes mix' for David Bowie's recent album, The Next Day.
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