The Sad Death of the Album

Great article. I feel the same way. Every once in a while, I'll listen to my music on shuffle, but most of the time I listen an album at a time. It just seems so ADD and hard to concentrate on when it's on shuffle! The musical styles, themes, and voices all jumping around and getting mixed up. I do appreciate albums.

An excellent set of observations.

I've just recently gotten back into the habit (lost when I first started ripping CDs) of listening to albums in sequence. However, I still use shuffle most of the time (like right now, actually). I enjoy iTunes's "Party Shuffle" feature because it enhances that "personal radio station" idea by playing my favorite songs more often (yes, I have all of my songs rated).

The reason I won't go back to listening to albums straight through all the time is the same reason why I used to listen to the radio when I only had CDs--there are some songs that I like a lot whose albums I don't care for.

I do understand the need for a story sometimes, and that's when I go back to albums every once in a while. Before I got my iPod, I would make my own mixes, and I did recognize a need for a story there. I spent hours deliberating over the order of a playlist before burning it. Now... Now, I'm just lazy. And Party Shuffle ain't half-bad most of the time.

Your write-up on the "inhuman shuffle" really hit home with me--my iPod is really stuffed with songs, and most of them weren't meant to be singles. I am a modern-woman-on-the-go-in-the-fast-lane and I can't always be bothered to pick something I really want to listen to, so Shuffle Songs is probably my most frequent click. And I hate that.

You may be pleased to know that there is a thriving vinyl community here in the US and abroad. I haven't bought a CD, basically, since high school. Between the iPod and the turntable, I find all my music listening needs are basically met. Plus...you know...they can't press security protocols on wax. This comforts me.

By the way, isn't it bad for the record if you play a single side repeatedly? Tsk tsk.

I really enjoyed your post David and I can totally relate. Just as video killed the radio star, Ipod killed the album. But one thing to keep in mind is that when mp3 players were first introduced albums especially those by popular musicians were already dead in that they no longer really had that common narrative thread like the albums of yesteryear (btw one of my favourite albums from start to finish is Neil Young's After the Goldrush-not a dud on there and the order is perfect too) and instead contained a hit or two surrounded by filler which is why the Ipod came at the perfect time b/c you could listen to the two songs and dump the dredge that surrounded them and couple these songs with others to create mega albums to suit your tastes, moods etc.

Since you're a child of the 70's, and you grew up on vinyl, you might enjoy this.

Good article David. The album isn't totally dead - you really can't listen to much Classical Music out of order and still get the musical sense out of it, but perhaps there aren't many pop/rock/etc artists that are actually making albums that actually need to be in an order. The new media types have made music collections more flexible, and I like that.

Oddly enough, I still listen to entire albums, in order, on my iRiver. I often think that it wouldn't matter if I just shuffled that album and listened to them in a random order.

Albums were always a nuisance anyway. It was always distressing to spend 18 bucks only to listen to 5 good songs out of 10. We were subsidising crap.

Rest in Pieces, Albums.

In many ways, we've just circled around to where we were prior to the mid 60s. Prior to then, albums were very much secondary to the singles. They were often nothing more than a collection of a few singles and whatever other crap was laying around. It really wasn't until somewhere around Rubber Soul that anyone really thought much about the album as a coheisive, narrative entitiy.

Of course, in the 70s everybody and their brother had a "concept album" and every song would go on for 37 minutes, so the single was in a bit of a bind.

So if the renewed interest in the single forces bands to create catchy memorable songs again, rather than prolonged interludes of self-absorbed wankery, I say good.

Good article, David.

Apart from the concept album, there was little continuity or narrative anyway. A lot of albums were just relatively random collections, whose order was often determined by the imperatives of running times as much as anything else (i.e. you had to balance the running time over two sides, despite any artistic considerations)

We only became used to the particular track order because it was inconvenient to play it any other way. (I suspect that much of the continuity was constructed by the listener, much of the time anyway)

Pre-vinyl (i.e. in the gramophone era) albums were boxed collections of discs/cylinders: if you wanted to hear the album in the prescribed order, you had to play each disc in turn, flipping sides and swapping discs.

I can imagine someone used to that format decrying the rise of the vinyl LP record.

In fairness, it was probably easier to play your favourite tracks with the collection of discs format, than it was with the LP.

'Great' (here defined as start to finish brilliance) albums were always something of a rarity: great albums with a sense of continuity or narrative even more so. Even then, we would often settle on favorite tracks (which we'd often assemble by taping them into compilations).

I still tend to buy albums in the digital era, the only exceptions being the odd track I like on an album that is mediocre or worse (there have always been one hit wonders since the first recordings were made): in the old days, I probably would have bought the single, or settled for a tape from someone I knew who had the album. Or not bought it at all.

I think the new technology has just presented us with more options.

As a former radio broadcaster/DJ I find the shuffle endlessly fascinating... the 'random' juxtaposition often works for me better than some of the most thoughtful programming I have ever heard. The randomness has given me a lot of ideas about the most unlikely segues that - despite all expectations - actually work. Sometimes it's as if you're getting a narrative from the random shuffle....

uuhhh..........yeah? ;-)

So true. Albums are made that way because that's how the artist wanted the music to be listened to, and to mix and match the songs takes something away from the listening experience. I only download albums, and listen to them, for the most part, straight through whenever possible.

I felt the same way, feeling bad that I had missed out on real albums... but I realized that most modern music is shrouded in so much metaphor. Marilyn Manson, Basement Jaxx, CKY, even kinda 'emo' stuff like Alexisonfire... they have made a mish-mash of the album algorithm by being so abstract, making songs easily dropped at a whim for radio while the entire album makes sense as an entire whole.(It's just not obvious)

Though as a whole(especially on the pop side of music, though nothing has changed there over time,) I agree that the album is a dying art... mostly because the consumers of my age don't want it. So they don't really read into it. =/

Personally, I make my own compilations... taking the meanings of each song and stringing them together to create a new album. It takes time but when you're finished you have a set that you can listen to over and over again!

Ahhh...but iTunes 7 has *revived* the album. You can now specify certain songs to always be played together, as part of the complete album, and always in the correct album order. (You can also do just a subset, so if two songs in particular really belong together, you can tie those two together.)

My husband and I still buy albums, some things just sound more like they are supposed to before they are "digitally remastered". There is some real good music that I would rather listen to on vinyl. For example, Robin Trower , Bridge of Sighs, is definitely better on vinyl.

I just about never use shuffle unless its on a playlist. I always listen to albums. The main problem I have is there are so many there are not good albums. They are few good sounds and the rest are fluff if not worse.

I like albums that fit as a whole and flow together well. Extreme's 3 Sides to Every Story, Flaming Lips Yoshimee Battles the Pink Robots, Dark side of the moon, etc.

I still buy albums on CD, but I do rip them onto my computer. It saves walking to the CD rack. Shuffle also means I hear music that I might otherwise forget I had.

One thing digital music really lacks for me is that idea of buying something solid. I love all the little books and stuff you get with CDs.