is "the album" dead?

[23skidoo]

I think to people who have rejected the idea of permanent media the album is dead. They just want a nice shiny thing to enjoy for awhile and then throw it away. 40 years from now there will be no Abbey Roads or Sgt Peppers to celebrate the anniversaries of. Just, maybe, individual songs. If anyone remembers any of them.

Part of the blame lies with the artists. Of course we'll still have people making theme albums, but they're going to be an extreme niche market. We'll never see Miley Cyrus or "insert name of Disney clone here" doing a theme album that requires listeners to actually pay attention for an hour.

Alex

 

[Steve Roby]

I wonder if the switch from the LP to the CD is part of the problem. Maybe it's just because I grew up with LPs, but the length of albums in the LP age, around 40 minutes or so, feels about right. With CDs, too many bands felt the need to fill up as much of the 80 minutes of space as possible, so a lot of albums have felt bloated with filler. Even when all the material is good, it's a bit much to sit through sometimes.

But even though I get a lot more albums these days as downloads from eMusic, itunes, boomkat, etc, than I do as actual CDs, I still prefer to engage with them as albums, and I often burn them for listening to in non-mp3 players. An album doesn't have to be an overblown prog concept album to still have some kind of structure and flow. It's a way to get a sense of what an artist is capable of, and a way to explore a mood or more fully immerse myself in that world.

(I also find that I'm more likely to listen to an album if I have it in physical form, because the main living room stereo doesn't do mp3s and neither does the car stereo. And for some favourite artists, I prefer to have the real thing.)