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The CD format has been slowly declining over the years, but has seen a bit of a spike lately thanks to increasing vinyl costs (and surprisingly, pop fans). Though don’t expect Atreyu to go hard on reprinting their whole back catalog. Not if vocalist Brandon Saller has anything to do with it.
According to Saller in an interview with the Brutally Delicious podcast, alternative methods of releasing new music – like standalone singles and digital EPs – is the way to go in 2023.
“I care less and less about the traditional kind of methods of things and more about, how do we actually get people to have the opportunity to digest all of the art? … You put out an album, put out 12 songs on an album and four of ’em get a light shined on them and are in the tens of millions of streams and have all this attention and then the other eight are in the hundreds of thousands, if that — maybe they hit a million,” said Saller. “They’re in the dark and you spent all this time on these songs. We’re not a band that has historically put out records with a bunch of filler; it’s hard to get songs past us. So, for us, it’s, like, ‘Oh, well, man, it just didn’t have opportunity to get shown.’
“I’m all about alternative methods of release. I think that physical release really only lies in vinyl and cool, like, collectors’ kind of stuff these days. I don’t care about CDs. I couldn’t play a CD if I wanted to. I don’t have a CD [player] in my car. I don’t have a CD player in my computer. But as far as just releasing things, I just wanna release things that make it more accessible and easy to actually consume and digest them. And I think that that potentially is in singles and EPs. I don’t know everything or anything. So we’ll see how it goes.”
Saller does make a fair point about albums in modern times, in that half the songs that aren’t singles (or are right up front in the running, etc.) get buried even if they’re great. But isn’t that kind of the whole point of physical media? To force yourself to sit down and listen to a whole album? Sure, CD players have skip buttons, but you could just y’know, have a decent attention span and not hit it.