IT is one of the most glamorous nights in the music industry calendar. The awarding of the Mercury Prize will tonight see the cream of the UK's music talent gathered together to celebrate the album of the year.
Florence and the Machine, Kasabian and Bat for Lashes are favourites to win the £20,000 prize this year, a prize that has garnered a reputation for recognising emerging new talent.
All this fuss, though, does seem a little incongruous if you belie
ve what so many commentators have been saying in recent years – that the album is dead.
In an age when the next generation of music shoppers is shunning CDs (vinyl is already ancient history) it is claimed there is no room for such an outdated format.
The iPod generation will only download their favourite songs. Why would they bother paying for an album full of filler tracks when they can pick and choose exactly what they want?
We live in an age when popular culture never demands that we concentrate for longer than three minutes at a time. So runs the argument. But sales statistics tell a different story.
The Mercury Prize will celebrate the musical output of the best British bands over the last year.
In that time, ten million download albums were sold online, most for around £7.99, a price broadly comparable to the cost of buying a CD. That ten million represented a 65 per cent increase on sales the previous year. And it does not include the millions of albums which were downloaded or shared illegally.
Three weeks into the release of Coldplay's latest album Viva La Vida, a third of sales (400,000) were downloads.
Admittedly, the 10 million only represents eight per cent of the total album sales in this country – and total album sales, including both downloads and CDs, did fall by 18 per cent – but it remains nevertheless a significant and dramatically growing market.
Melissa Avdeef, an Edinburgh University student who is researching a PhD on the use of iPods among youngsters in the city, says we are going through major changes in the way we buy our music.
"I've conducted interviews with high school kids in Edinburgh and found that, overwhelmingly, these youths were downloading singles instead of albums," she says.
"For the most part, their tastes were dictated by what was in the charts, and then, in turn, what they could easily download from the internet, or Bluetooth from their friends. For these youths, CDs are definitely a thing of the past.
"People are able to spread their money over a variety of artists, rather than paying the entire price for an album that they may or may not listen to in its entirety.
We are on the edge of another major shift in the music industry, and it will be very exciting to see how it unfolds."
Nick Prior, an expert in popular culture and digital music and senior lecturer at Edinburgh University's school of social and political science, is convinced the traditions that underpin the music industry will survive and adapt to new technologies.
"The record industry still thinks of the album as the basic commoditised unit on which tours, prizes and reputations can be made. Recording contracts are still predominantly ordered around album deals, although this is increasingly bundled with live music commitments.
"New bands still showcase their talent in album form to demonstrate that they are serious about their art and have the depth of song-writing talent to remain relevant beyond the one-off single.
"In short, all technologies are complex, constraining and enabling, and I don't think the album is dying as a result of a single application like iTunes."
It does seem there is life in the old format yet.
And that surely is something to celebrate. While the appeal of selecting a single for under a pound rather than buying an album is clear, there is much to be lost from neglecting an album. Some of the best songs ever written have been album tracks. The popularity of Oasis B-sides and obscure tracks were so great that they decided to release an album purely containing them. Bob Dylan, widely regarded as the best song-writer of all time, would never have had so much of his material heard had he merely been a one-hit iTunes wonder.
What would be the point in going to see one of your favourite bands if you only knew three of their songs? The fact is, were it not for albums, bands would probably never have bothered writing some of the most important tracks ever composed, let alone record them.
The album is dead, long live the album.
