MUSIC albums are a peculiar thing. Most casual listeners associate an artist with a song, and sometimes for life, if they are not curious enough to discover the artists’ broader body of work. To record collectors, they are not just priceless cultural artifacts, but also an investment.

Make no mistake – music albums are here to stay. It better be since I just launched my new album.

It’s an uphill learning curve for someone like me now that I have to push for a physical CD format album and finding novel ways to engage with my fans and potential listeners.

In this age of digital music streaming, many have argued that it is a cultural environment ripe for the death of the album and CEOs of these digital streaming services would offer in their usual corporate sermon their predictions of the future. Luckily for us, Covid-19 derailed most of their ego-inflated “visions”.

I have no qualms about my suspicion of most digital platforms for they do very little to encourage artists to aim for the larger canvas of making albums that have some thematic coherence or mood. I, for one, with my film and TV training, often liken albums to films and songs, which are the individual scenes that make up the whole.

The artists and their producers (and, of course, sometimes managers) spend a lot of time thinking about the track order of their albums to not only shape some sonic and narrative order, but also to gauge whether the song flow has the appropriate “feel” and “mood”.

The insistence of one these CEOs for musicians to adhere to his argument amounts to the typical sleight of hand by corporate figures to beat artists into submission. His statement is self-serving as it only benefits the company he founded, and naturally he is only interested in its own wellbeing.

Mind you, I still use these services as a music fan as they provide a well-archived repository for music that I enjoy and would like to discover. But as a recording and performing artist, I disagree with the assertions made – and many artists are also on my side. A friend remarked once on social media that it must have been a bucket list of mine to get my songs on these platforms. My answer was a solid “no”.

I never formally studied music theory (stopped at Grade 3 when I was 10 years old) and production and learnt it along the way. As a result of this self-learning, I discovered how to make albums by loving the format as a fan and then making them myself as a musician.

It has been a long journey – my first solo album was just on a basic 60-minute TDK cassette that you could buy in stores in which I dubbed songs I recorded directly on my Walkman. It was called Whatever and I released it in super-limited copies to just my bandmates and friends in the music underground community back in 1997.

It did not even have a proper cover; just the handwritten list of the songs in the available insert that came along with the empty cassette.

Another challenge was that I could only find 60-minute cassettes at the time, so I had to write enough songs to fit 60 minutes’ worth of tape. This was good practice since I had to think of some broader concept, not just treating it as a compilation of songs.

I was also living abroad in Perth, Australia at the time and depressed from being away from my friends and the booming underground KL music scene of the late 1990s. I was encouraged to try it out because I was a recent convert to a new faith, i.e. DIY (do-it-yourself) culture which had its roots in the punk rock subcultures of the 1980s, introduced by my friends from the underground music scene.

To my surprise, I was hooked immediately and drunk on its sense of empowerment. I no longer had to do the usual thing that most musicians do – record a demo and send it to some corporate record company and wait with bated breath for their response.

Horror stories I heard from some musician friends about how some would send demos and not hear a word from the label only to hear one day their exact melody in a song on the radio, but is not credited to them.

I do not know how true some of these stories were but it is hardly a stretch – the music industry is probably the most depraved and corrupt of landscapes one could imagine and musicians are often at the receiving end of this in spite of being the “face”, or shall we say “mascots”, of the industry.

Nasir Jani’s classic film Kembara Seni Jalanan (1986), starring then working-class hero M. Nasir (now “sifu”), also implicitly and explicitly addressed issues about the mainstream music industry versus artistry while also effectively romanticising the notion of the troubadour within a Malaysian context.

It was probably the last film ever made that dealt with this theme with respect and artistic gusto. I watched it again on YouTube recently in a moment of nostalgia and was taken in again at how relevant its themes are today. 

The music-making cultural landscape is broader than just musicians and record labels. It includes the circulation of recorded physical works (with vinyl being the most valued by collectors and record “diggers”), which circulates the broader shared cultural meanings and memories of the artists and their works.

It is also worth a lot of money, just not for CEOs. The digital landscape is no match to tangible works of art. – October 2, 2020.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.