Good overview. The persistence of albums has as much to do with artists and the industry as it does listeners. Albums are a way to measure greatness, and artists want to be part of that lineage, to prove themselves. Albums are a way to focus attention and provide structure for conversations. I don’t think they’re going anywhere any time soon.
Agreed. Also, even beyond technology, artists and listeners clearly want some longer format music. Beethoven’s 5th Symphony is like 40 minutes. The perfect length for an album lol
A nitpick: In the cassette era(s), people made tapes at least as much from albums (records, CDs, and other tapes) as they did from the radio. I would guess more. It was partly to cherrypick the best tracks from albums, but also for social exchange, for portability (if you had the album at home, you'd tape it so you could listen on your walkman without rebuying it) etc etc.
In general: It seemed so logical a decade ago to predict the demise of the album in favor of loosie singles and playlists. Didn't happen. And I agree with Mark that it's probably artists who are the biggest influence - they still want to *make albums. It will be interesting to see if that changes in the future, with artists who didn't grow up with physical media, but for now.
That’s a great point and something I didn’t really think about. (Probably because I was born as the cassette era was dying.) I do feel like even in a post-album era collections of songs will be assembled. But maybe that is just the same in name only
Dear Chris + those on thread. You can deep dive into the phenomena behind the album’s success in ‘the digital age’ in my book Body of Work: how the album outplayed the algorithm and survived playlist culture. Website here: https://www.songsommelier.com/body-of-work - get in touch if more curious about how and why I wrote it! K
I was gonna get really salty about this until you came the same conclusion I always do ;) Albums are a big deal! No matter how much people make playlists or avail themselves of streaming features or don't buy physical albums at all, the concept and craft of the album has well and truly persisted.
My 8-year old can read the song/artist/album info on our car display and has asked a couple of times what the "Album" tag means. I honestly really struggle to explain it to her. The closest thing I've come up with is that an album is like a book and songs are the chapters. She doesn't have any context to understand it. Her music listening experience is pretty much looking up songs on Spotify that she wants to hear and maybe listening to a playlist. We don't really use our CDs or records anymore.
So maybe in 5-10 years when her cohort is really getting into music, albums will be less impactful? It will be interesting to see.
That book-and-chapters line is exactly right, and it holds up from the other side of the studio glass too. When you make a record you're not just gathering songs, you're sequencing them: which track opens, where the quiet one sits, what you want still ringing in someone's ears as it fades out. It's authored order, the same as chapters. I've spend hours, days, weeks agonising over this for my music. A listener can shuffle it, just as you can skip to chapter 12, but the shape was put there on purpose. I'd push back on the 5–10 years worry. I think kids find the long form the moment an artist matters enough to them that one song stops being enough. The format follows the love, not the other way round. She'll get there with someone!
I'd have to imagine part of this comes from streaming platforms all but disincentivizing releasing albums, or at least dripping out songs month to month if you do. It's a bit annoying though when you discover a new artist you like and all they have available to hear are a couple singles as opposed to a full on album.
Yeah because a guy who's one of the most listened to artists on the platform releasing an album and it doing well totally invalidates the fact that even artists like U2 have broken full albums they've done up into two parts because of how the platform operates. Daniel Ek has all but said "singles>albums."
Then why is the album more popular and relevant than its ever been? There's algorithmic incentive for big artists to release albums to see what organically will pop. This is a ten year old strategy around since Migos.
The reason why upcoming artists only have singles is because they don't have a big enough audience, and they need to balance supply and demand. Some artists drop five albums before the blow up (see Geese or Dean Blunt), others use scarcity to their advantage, both for algorithms and for hype.
This is nothing new, the Beatles did the same.
The album survives because of a mix of incentives and because the audience has more taste and media literacy than ever. Most listeners with an interest in music want a world they can step into, a body of work with overarching themes and artistic statements.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying here but we're talking about streaming. And the way places like Spotify are set up is not album-forward. Some artists release "albums" but a lot of times those albums are basically a collection of singles dripped out over the course of months because of what streaming platforms incentivize for algorithmic discovery. Releasing a full album to a streaming service doesn't really align with what they're about. They want singles coming one after the next, not one album every 2 years.
Yes. I wish for Spotify or any streaming service to include album liner notes and an album-shuffle feature.
That said, albums were more like a collection of singles before streaming. Filler has disappeared in albums since streaming. It's a weird thing, almost a paradox. And of course the average Spotify user doesn't care about albums. What I am saying is the album is in a golden age right now, weirdly because of streaming
They were, but there was also a financial incentive to make them back when physical media was the only way to go. Nowadays, especially with how ephemeral everything is, you could spend a year making a record and it would be out of everyone's mind in a few days, which is a shame. I listen to albums much more than singles, but Spotify wants people to be constantly releasing things to keep people engaged. But I agree too about us being in a golden age of albums, especially since there are certain albums, like live albums, that play better on streaming because you don't have to change a disc or flip a record. It's interesting how that part has shaken out.
Regarding the albums dating back to 1926 -- those were still a bunch of 78s, right? I definitely need to check out that book -- I'm just curious who was releasing those albums.
One things about cassettes -- in the late '70s, and probably before then, album rock stations would play whole albums, often as a midnight thing. One station here in Chicago would play new releases, and I'd stay up and tape them. Live concerts were also a big staple of AOR Radio, and I had a number of those on tape.
It's crazy because on one end we're living in the golden age of albums, with so many artist relying heavily on the format and the obsession with capital-E Eras being applied to most big artists with notable fanbases. On the other end, half the people I know don't really listen to albums – these are the same people who never watch movies and only TV. The other half are interested. Cultural polarization
The Ash example is the one I always reach for here. Around 2007 they announced they were finished with albums, singles only from now on, and properly committed to it with the A–Z Series, a new track every fortnight for a year. Then Tim Wheeler (who I admire by the way!) admitted he'd got it wrong: a rolling singles campaign was exhausting to sustain and market, and back to albums they went. If anyone had earned the right to kill the format it was a band who'd always been a far better singles act than an albums one and even they came back. A single is a moment; an album is a story, something substantial and of its time. I was gigging through exactly those years, and the records that stuck with me, mine and everyone else's, were always the ones that added up to more than their tracks. Lovely piece.
Great article. I couldn’t agree more with your idea that we all need some kind of quest. I’ve actually been listening through Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums list myself, and I honestly couldn’t be enjoying it more. Check out my page if you’re interested.
“If you want to sell out stadiums, you need to make great albums.” This seems like faulty logic to me. Most people selling out stadiums are artists signed to big labels. Big labels are the ones with the most money and the most marketing power to promote an artist and get them to a stadium level. Big labels are also the ones that still operate with the old blueprint ie the album model. This could very well be correlation, not causation.
Of course you need great music and a certain quantity of it to reach stadium level, but besides the obvious logic of physical media, I don’t understand what is gained by artificially grouping songs by 10 or 12, especially if there is no particular concept behind it. Sure, an album is a great opportunity for marketing, but so are 12 singles. Arguably even more so.
The only upside to dropping albums instead of singles, in my opinion, is that the industry will have an easier time seeing you as a serious artist. Reason enough for me to do it, I suppose…
1) Just for completeness sake, the obvious importance of how albums are useful to organize marketing campaigns and shape artist creative output in discrete units could each have a paragraph of their own in this discussion.
2) I dream of a world where streaming services in general (or Spotify in particular) would bring a modicum of functionality to album listening comparable to what they offer to podcasts:
- autosaving the exact song and moment a user stopped listening to the album (always easy to resume any podcast episode exactly where it stopped)
- a podcast episode is easily followed by the "next" one. It would be cool if "Unforgettable Fire" started automatically after "War"
- should not be hard to browse some liner notes that are not a hard-to-read and zoom PDF...
I probably buy in excess of 100 (new) LPs a year, mostly on vinyl, but I'm an old guy who grew up on the album format and never abandoned records in favor of CD (though I also buy CDs, which are perfect for certain purposes). I'm delighted to hear that album sales have picked up!
Good overview. The persistence of albums has as much to do with artists and the industry as it does listeners. Albums are a way to measure greatness, and artists want to be part of that lineage, to prove themselves. Albums are a way to focus attention and provide structure for conversations. I don’t think they’re going anywhere any time soon.
Agreed. Also, even beyond technology, artists and listeners clearly want some longer format music. Beethoven’s 5th Symphony is like 40 minutes. The perfect length for an album lol
Exactly right. It's night and day when an artist pays attention to sequencing.
A nitpick: In the cassette era(s), people made tapes at least as much from albums (records, CDs, and other tapes) as they did from the radio. I would guess more. It was partly to cherrypick the best tracks from albums, but also for social exchange, for portability (if you had the album at home, you'd tape it so you could listen on your walkman without rebuying it) etc etc.
In general: It seemed so logical a decade ago to predict the demise of the album in favor of loosie singles and playlists. Didn't happen. And I agree with Mark that it's probably artists who are the biggest influence - they still want to *make albums. It will be interesting to see if that changes in the future, with artists who didn't grow up with physical media, but for now.
That’s a great point and something I didn’t really think about. (Probably because I was born as the cassette era was dying.) I do feel like even in a post-album era collections of songs will be assembled. But maybe that is just the same in name only
Dear Chris + those on thread. You can deep dive into the phenomena behind the album’s success in ‘the digital age’ in my book Body of Work: how the album outplayed the algorithm and survived playlist culture. Website here: https://www.songsommelier.com/body-of-work - get in touch if more curious about how and why I wrote it! K
Love this. Shoot me an email. I might be interested in doing an interview. Cdallarivamusic at gmail
I was gonna get really salty about this until you came the same conclusion I always do ;) Albums are a big deal! No matter how much people make playlists or avail themselves of streaming features or don't buy physical albums at all, the concept and craft of the album has well and truly persisted.
I would never let you down
My 8-year old can read the song/artist/album info on our car display and has asked a couple of times what the "Album" tag means. I honestly really struggle to explain it to her. The closest thing I've come up with is that an album is like a book and songs are the chapters. She doesn't have any context to understand it. Her music listening experience is pretty much looking up songs on Spotify that she wants to hear and maybe listening to a playlist. We don't really use our CDs or records anymore.
So maybe in 5-10 years when her cohort is really getting into music, albums will be less impactful? It will be interesting to see.
I hope this isn't the case. Show her one of your albums if you still have them!
That book-and-chapters line is exactly right, and it holds up from the other side of the studio glass too. When you make a record you're not just gathering songs, you're sequencing them: which track opens, where the quiet one sits, what you want still ringing in someone's ears as it fades out. It's authored order, the same as chapters. I've spend hours, days, weeks agonising over this for my music. A listener can shuffle it, just as you can skip to chapter 12, but the shape was put there on purpose. I'd push back on the 5–10 years worry. I think kids find the long form the moment an artist matters enough to them that one song stops being enough. The format follows the love, not the other way round. She'll get there with someone!
As a zillennial, we also were exclusively into songs well into our teens. This is nothing new.
I'd have to imagine part of this comes from streaming platforms all but disincentivizing releasing albums, or at least dripping out songs month to month if you do. It's a bit annoying though when you discover a new artist you like and all they have available to hear are a couple singles as opposed to a full on album.
This statement aged like milk considering Drake's recent release
Yeah because a guy who's one of the most listened to artists on the platform releasing an album and it doing well totally invalidates the fact that even artists like U2 have broken full albums they've done up into two parts because of how the platform operates. Daniel Ek has all but said "singles>albums."
Then why is the album more popular and relevant than its ever been? There's algorithmic incentive for big artists to release albums to see what organically will pop. This is a ten year old strategy around since Migos.
The reason why upcoming artists only have singles is because they don't have a big enough audience, and they need to balance supply and demand. Some artists drop five albums before the blow up (see Geese or Dean Blunt), others use scarcity to their advantage, both for algorithms and for hype.
This is nothing new, the Beatles did the same.
The album survives because of a mix of incentives and because the audience has more taste and media literacy than ever. Most listeners with an interest in music want a world they can step into, a body of work with overarching themes and artistic statements.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying here but we're talking about streaming. And the way places like Spotify are set up is not album-forward. Some artists release "albums" but a lot of times those albums are basically a collection of singles dripped out over the course of months because of what streaming platforms incentivize for algorithmic discovery. Releasing a full album to a streaming service doesn't really align with what they're about. They want singles coming one after the next, not one album every 2 years.
Yes. I wish for Spotify or any streaming service to include album liner notes and an album-shuffle feature.
That said, albums were more like a collection of singles before streaming. Filler has disappeared in albums since streaming. It's a weird thing, almost a paradox. And of course the average Spotify user doesn't care about albums. What I am saying is the album is in a golden age right now, weirdly because of streaming
They were, but there was also a financial incentive to make them back when physical media was the only way to go. Nowadays, especially with how ephemeral everything is, you could spend a year making a record and it would be out of everyone's mind in a few days, which is a shame. I listen to albums much more than singles, but Spotify wants people to be constantly releasing things to keep people engaged. But I agree too about us being in a golden age of albums, especially since there are certain albums, like live albums, that play better on streaming because you don't have to change a disc or flip a record. It's interesting how that part has shaken out.
Regarding the albums dating back to 1926 -- those were still a bunch of 78s, right? I definitely need to check out that book -- I'm just curious who was releasing those albums.
One things about cassettes -- in the late '70s, and probably before then, album rock stations would play whole albums, often as a midnight thing. One station here in Chicago would play new releases, and I'd stay up and tape them. Live concerts were also a big staple of AOR Radio, and I had a number of those on tape.
It was a collection of 78s but Friedwald contends that this functioned the same as your contemporary LP
It's crazy because on one end we're living in the golden age of albums, with so many artist relying heavily on the format and the obsession with capital-E Eras being applied to most big artists with notable fanbases. On the other end, half the people I know don't really listen to albums – these are the same people who never watch movies and only TV. The other half are interested. Cultural polarization
The Ash example is the one I always reach for here. Around 2007 they announced they were finished with albums, singles only from now on, and properly committed to it with the A–Z Series, a new track every fortnight for a year. Then Tim Wheeler (who I admire by the way!) admitted he'd got it wrong: a rolling singles campaign was exhausting to sustain and market, and back to albums they went. If anyone had earned the right to kill the format it was a band who'd always been a far better singles act than an albums one and even they came back. A single is a moment; an album is a story, something substantial and of its time. I was gigging through exactly those years, and the records that stuck with me, mine and everyone else's, were always the ones that added up to more than their tracks. Lovely piece.
Yes
Great article. I couldn’t agree more with your idea that we all need some kind of quest. I’ve actually been listening through Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums list myself, and I honestly couldn’t be enjoying it more. Check out my page if you’re interested.
“If you want to sell out stadiums, you need to make great albums.” This seems like faulty logic to me. Most people selling out stadiums are artists signed to big labels. Big labels are the ones with the most money and the most marketing power to promote an artist and get them to a stadium level. Big labels are also the ones that still operate with the old blueprint ie the album model. This could very well be correlation, not causation.
Of course you need great music and a certain quantity of it to reach stadium level, but besides the obvious logic of physical media, I don’t understand what is gained by artificially grouping songs by 10 or 12, especially if there is no particular concept behind it. Sure, an album is a great opportunity for marketing, but so are 12 singles. Arguably even more so.
The only upside to dropping albums instead of singles, in my opinion, is that the industry will have an easier time seeing you as a serious artist. Reason enough for me to do it, I suppose…
1) Just for completeness sake, the obvious importance of how albums are useful to organize marketing campaigns and shape artist creative output in discrete units could each have a paragraph of their own in this discussion.
2) I dream of a world where streaming services in general (or Spotify in particular) would bring a modicum of functionality to album listening comparable to what they offer to podcasts:
- autosaving the exact song and moment a user stopped listening to the album (always easy to resume any podcast episode exactly where it stopped)
- a podcast episode is easily followed by the "next" one. It would be cool if "Unforgettable Fire" started automatically after "War"
- should not be hard to browse some liner notes that are not a hard-to-read and zoom PDF...
I probably buy in excess of 100 (new) LPs a year, mostly on vinyl, but I'm an old guy who grew up on the album format and never abandoned records in favor of CD (though I also buy CDs, which are perfect for certain purposes). I'm delighted to hear that album sales have picked up!