Sheldon Pearce's Top 20 Albums of 2022
Near the start of 2022, Warner Music Group announced a partnership with The Sandbox, "a virtual world where players can build, own, and monetize their gaming experiences in the Ethereum blockchain," with the promise that the Minecraft-like game would serve as a new arena for music and entertainment. Exactly what was being offered was unclear, other than the chance to buy virtual real estate near WMG's digital property. Sony, meanwhile, moved forward on an agreement to bring the artists on its roster into Roblox, staging a "concert experience" on the platform in March starring an avatar of rapper 24kGoldn. Universal teamed up with the avatar company Genies, whose CEO Akash Nigam asserted,"We're not bringing culture to NFTs and crypto. Genies and UMG together are bringing the power of NFTs and crypto to culture."
The gamification of music experiences isn't new, or necessarily bad — and who knows whether these label partnerships will take root in any meaningful way, especially given recent news on the state of Web 3.0 and the metaverse. But in a year when even beloved independent music retailer Bandcamp was purchased by Epic Games, these moves have left me thinking more than usual about albums, and their utility in a digital age that seems disinterested in what they do best.
If the invention of the album made music, an intangible thing, literally tangible, it's fair to say that streaming nudged it back toward the abstract. The most recent digital expansions of music listening, fixated on virtual immersion, would appear to offer a corrective, an invitation to step fully inside the work. And yet, at least as envisioned so far by the Big Three, these experiments never seem to be designed with continuous, intent listening in mind. Events like Charli XCX's June performance on Superstar Galaxy, a virtual Roblox concert promoting a Samsung phone, conjure a vision of artists as intellectual property to be leveraged and music as wrapping paper for whatever's really being sold. (, the with lightsabers, might at least point to a retail endgame for labels, as users can buy artist "packs" of songs to slash to;will run you $14.99.) The way consumption of full albums is trending — down again this year — this kind of thing feels at best like a hedge in a shifting landscape. But if each new digital economy assigns less value to the album as a substantial medium, a thing with its own shape and directive even when floating in the ether, what will its next life cycle be? What is an album's function in purely theoretical space?
