Could the "song" model work the same for "articles"?

On Saturday, the Globe and Mail carried an interesting and provocative article by Robert Everett Green about the ascendancy of the song over the traditional "album" approach in pop music.

It occured (and perhaps not a moment too soon) that this has potential implications for magazines. If the song is the unit of commerce and interaction in music, could it be that the "article" could similarly become the unit for magazines? Well, yes and no and maybe.

"You've got to spend only a short time online to realize that songs, not albums, are the principal medium of exchange on the Internet," said the article. "Every time someone buys a portable digital-music player (and 1 in 3 music buyers owned one last year, up from 1 in 4 in 2005), that person has one less reason to buy CDs. What's less clear is how this is reshaping our ideas about popular music, and what, if anything, may replace the conventional album -- or the conventional single, for that matter."

There is no evidence that end users are interested in remixing, mashing or otherwise sampling magazine articles (though, who knows, they may be).

Some readers might be interested in paying a small amount to buy only the article or articles they wanted, but magazines would be much less interested in selling the content that way, since 60% or more of consumer magazine revenue comes from advertising which, to put it one way, is the business of renting readers to advertisers.

If readers were able to circumvent this by buying only the text and illustrations of one story out of many, they would essentially be opting out of the audience, thereby reducing what magazines are renting to advertisers. It wouldn't result in readers paying the cost of production, merely not paying for it by lending their attention to advertising messages.

Plus, research shows that magazine readers actually like the ads they see and consider them part of the magazine-reading experience.