Recently, Aphex Twin has been setting the electronic music world ablaze, first by coming out of his 13-year hibernation with Syro, then by showering the Internet with gratis releases, including a 21-track modular synth album. Again, it’s clear that Aphex Twin isn’t chucking out his music for free because he’s undervaluing his artistic worth. They frigging amazing if I don’t mind saying so myself,” is how he described the motherlode.
We live in an age of digital abundance, and record labels are putting a value on albums that the market simply cannot bear. If artists want the album to retain its value both artistically and financially in the future, they have several options. They can make their albums extremely scarce—Wu-Tang Clan’s single-copy Once Upon a Time in Shaolin fetched $5 million, and Aphex Twin’s “lost album” Caustic Window surpassed its goal of $67,424 on Kickstarter. They can also enhance their albums with technology—Deru’s Obverse Box was a hand-held pico projector that allowed users to watch a video with each song. (That went for $500 and $8000.) They can also treat the album as a novelty object—YACHT’s most recent EP Where Does This Disco? includes an unplayable clear disc with the band’s entire musical catalog. But much to the powers-that-be's chagrin, standing on a soap box insisting on the inherent value of an album doesn’t automatically make it so.
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