PlayButton Resurrects Music Albums Whilst Staying Fashionable

Many music artists mourn the passing of the album.

It was a band or musician’s vision of how their favourite newly recorded tracks best followed each other – better still, how the individual songs ran through the LP and told a story from beginning to end.

With the advent of digital music and that pesky shuffle command few of us these days will actually get the enjoyment of listening to and album from track one through to the final note of the last track.

Playbutton was a badge-based concept but is now getting ready to go on sale in February 2011 with eight different albums to choose from.

The button, or badge, is an MP3 player but there’s no way of you getting the tracks off of it or altering the play order – there are fast-forward and rewind controls should you want to skip. Needless to say that there’s no shuffle button; all of which keeps it as albumy as possible 🙂

Artists can slap a pic on the badge so a logo or album artwork can be worn as a badge and the fan can plug into it when they want as it will surely always be on their favourite garment 😉

Playbutton founder Nick Dangerfield says albums sold on the buttons could be as much as $30 apiece, although he notes that it’ll be up to the artists to decide how much they want to charge — he suggests the “ideal price” would be $15 if bands sold them at shows.

Would you buy a badge that played an album? Let me know as I’m tempted to look into this for SUBSET and/or ByeByeKurt.