The Album is Not Dead

I keep reading references, usually in question form, to the death of the album.

Nonsense.

It's not happening. I'll start with the short version, so that if you're not enraptured with my opinion you can move along before you've burned too much time listening to me rant.

If the album is dead, all we have left is singles. Preposterous supposition. Even if we're talking about singles compiled into your very own mix CDs or playlists, it's still a preposterous supposition.

Here's why.

The earliest recordings of popular music were indeed singles. And what was one of the very earliest developments in media storage?

The album. You know, like a photo album, a storage device, only for your 78 r.p.m. records.

Was this some corporate ploy to sell albums? No, it was a genuine need to store, sort, and aggregate music in ways that made sense to listeners and collectors. Has that need disappeared? Of course not. As soon as technology made it possible, artists started compiling the albums themselves, releasing what were then called 'long playing' records, or LPs. (One advantage of being an old guy is you have far distant memories of this stuff, allowing you to add a ring of authenticity to your ravings.)

The fussy technical answer is, we'll always put our music into groupings and categories, listening to batches at a time that make sense to us.

Guess what? That's an album.

But albums in the sense most of us think about aren't dead, either. Very, very few artists are interested in releasing their songs one at a time, a string of singles never compiled into an album. It's not economically feasible, for one thing. Sure, you can buy a single song online, but only from artists that make them available that way. Not all do, and many won't until all kinds of technical and copyright issues are sorted out in a way that protects the artists' intellectual property without destroying the experience for listeners.

Even if artists and their management could be swayed by public opinion, is public opinion going to demand an album-less music scene? Well, you can answer for yourself; I'll speak for me.

Will the Album Ever Die?

No.

While I do have the occasional single here and there in my MP3 collection (and, I'm surprised to note, one or two CD 'singles' I didn't recollect buying) virtually all my music purchases have been albums. In 35 years of music-buying, I bought exactly one 7" vinyl single, and that was a rare copy of Neil Young's "Sugar Mountain" which I bought mostly for the investment value (and I hope the current owner realizes what she's got, or at least gives it to one of our children.) Otherwise, I took my hard-earned pennies down to the record store and bought albums.

At 13, I was probably a little different from the other kids. At parties, most of them had singles; boxes of them. But that changed as we all grew up. Once again, over time, it was the single that faded, not the album. Think back over your music-buying history: what's the proportion of singles vs. albums in your collection? If you're old enough to be allowed on the internet reading this, I'll bet there's a high percentage of albums (I'd call mine well over 95%.)

Isn't it the Single That's Endangered?

Yup; historically, new technology makes it feasible to sell singles, and as soon as even newer technology makes it possible for the artist to compile albums instead, the single fades into obscurity.

So, instead of pondering the death of the album, here's what I'm pondering: what technology is going to come along to shift digital music on the internet from the single to the musically historical inevitable, the album?

And how can I get there first?

We've Had Our Say; How About You?

Is the album dead or dying, or just in a temporary lull, waiting to come back and crush the single yet once more? What do you think?