I was thinking, the incentives of making an album have changed, so does that mean that albums have changed as well?

I don’t really write that much about music, but here we are. Two music related posts in a row.

First, I’m not trying to say albums are an inherently superior artform to singles. That being said, in my mind great songs are perfect encapsulations of that moment in time, while albums are timeless. This might be why I listen to albums more. There is a nostalgic feel to listening to songs from the past and I am not a nostalgic person. Great albums are just, to me, more full experiences that let me distance myself from my daily routine.

Anyhow…

Did you know that the name album for a collection of music comes from the original albums being packaged like photoalbums? Wait, does anyone even know what a photoalbum is anymore? Well, back in the day when the vinyls you were able to make couldn’t hold very much music, they would only release songs. The first album was a bunch of these vinyls of a Beethoven symphony, if I remember correctly, packaged basically into a book.

Then, later, when the technology got better, they would actually be able to put more music onto one vinyl disc, releasing music in albums became more commonplace, but in the 50s and 60s, this often meant just having that one hit song and filling the rest with whatever. Of course, there were exceptions, such as Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue from 1959 and things changed rapidly during the 60s with artists such as Beach Boys, Velvet Underground and The Beatles (who probably were the first to truely master them) producing great albums (and plenty of others, but this was definitely a period where the album came to be an art form of its own).

Sure, the culture of albums quickly thrown together around one single song never went away. In many ways the incentive was to make one quickly if you had a hit, because the culture of consumerism encourages us to buy the product that gives us more bang for our buck so to say, so instead of paying seven or eight euros for a single on CD, we would rather pay 20 for an album, even though, according to research at the time, most people never actually even listened to the whole album. They would only listen to that one hit song a few times and go back to listening to radio or watching MTV (or VIVA2 in my case, when it was available). It didn’t really matter what was on that piece of plastic.

But now the incentives are different. Album sales have plummeted and now the business of releasing music is all about streaming. So, you want to keep people listening. In order to do that, you need a good album.

At the same time, there are forces fighting this. Spotify, for example, encourages listening to various automatically produced or, in some cases, carefully curated playlists, and of course the older generations still listen to radio. You can see the single-mindset still being there. Take Kate Bush, for example. One of the great artists of all time. Running Up that Hill has ten times more plays on Spotify than her next highest played song (surprisingly Army Dreamers, which I would have though is too strange to be popular).This is also absurd considering that Hounds of Love, the album the song is from, is one of the greatest albums of all time even if the second side (tracks 6-12) get kind of esoteric.

We can see differences between albums. Take Beyonce’s Renaissance, for instance. While there are couple of outliers on Spotify, most of the songs have pretty similar number of plays, which probably means that people are actually listening to it whole way through. At the same time, it is pretty difficult to find similar examples, but looking at Pitchfork’s top of the best albums of 2020s (so far) Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud, ML Buch’s Suntub as well as billy woods’ and Kenny Segal’s Maps all seem to be pretty consistent in their numbers (with osme outliers again, of course, for the singles and by the way, ML Buch deserves much more attention than what she is getting now).

Of course, streaming allows for very different strategies as well. Some artists want to milk their albums more, so they release them in chunks to get people back to listening to them on multiple occasions. You can make your own evolving playlists, almost like a compilation album of yesteryears. I bet there’s SEO possibilities as well, even if I don’t really know how they work on these services.

I do still want those coherent artistic statements in the form of an album. An artist will definitely get more plays from me with an album I like. I just don’t know how common my approach is. It would seem many listeners don’t care. They just want that short injection of emotion and I can’t really blame them.

Gladly, artists are still making albums even if they aren’t necessarily the best approach from a financial point of view. On the other hand, in order to form a relationship with an audience, you probably need that body of work, which probably should include albums. So, the incentive to make those albums might be there. To have a long career, you need that thing fans can latch on. Sure, you can have a career as a one-hit wonder, but that will lead to endless touring with diminishing returns from smaller and smaller venues. I’m not going to name the band, but I kind of felt sorry for one act that used to be pretty big in the mid-90s when I saw them performing in a bar in a small municipality of about 8000 people.

Since I really don’t know how to end this, here are some great albums from all over the world and some great singles that either weren’t on an album or were on a mediocre album:

Albums:

• yeule: softscars
• Feelies: Crazy Rhythms
• Carla Morrison: Amor Suprimo
• The Knife: Silent Shout
• Avalanches: Since I Left You
• Mdou Moctar: Afrique Victime
• Fontaines DC: Skinty Fia

Singles:

• Joy Division: Love Will Tear Us Apart
• Jayda G: Both of Us
• Johnny Boy: You Are the Generation that Bought More Shoes and You’ll Get What You Deserve
• !!!: Me and Giuliani Down by the Schoolyard – A True Story
• Black Kids: I’m Not Going to Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance
• Jarvis Cocker: Running the World
• Chromatics: Shadow
• Girl Unit: Wut
• SOPHIE: Bipp