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Collections of tracks
Do you listen to albums any more?
For me, the answer is (almost, and I’ll come to that later) no.
In fact, are albums really all that relevant any more?
Now don’t get me wrong, I am very much not trying to push for the single track mentality that we were all supposed to gravitate to thanks to digital music. No, I think getting an artists’ output in roughly 10-15 track chucks works and makes sense; you can’t get a true sense for what an artist is trying to achieve with much less then that.
Singles can so easily be just a one-off, flash in the pan moment of brilliance or conversely an oddity that doesn’t represent the full body of work justly. EPs on the hand can give you much more of the full picture, but still leave you wanting so much more (for example, the 5 track sampler for ‘Twenty One’ by Mystery Jets was by no means representative of the best bits of the full album).
Albums as a collection of tracks, then, is still relevant. However, does the concept of an album make sense?
It’s all about the ubiquitous ‘shuffle’ of course. When iPods and the iTunes Store first came along I remember much talk about the ‘death of the album’ as people could now mix their music collections together into shuffled-up playlists and cherry-pick the tracks they like instead of buying the whole thing, filler and all. 5 years on and this only seems to be half right – people shuffle and concoct playlists, but the death of the album just hasn’t happened. Single tracks sell like singles have always sold – give or take – and album sales (for album artists) have remained steady.
However, digital consumption of music I think is definitely making a difference. Looking around on Last.fm and looking at people’s listening habits you can see a huge amount of ‘shuffle’ – each track being a different artist and a different album. And I think this is not only because of how people are listening but also because of the albums are being released at the moment.
When was the last time you listened to an album that was obviously designed as an album, rather then a series of tracks? Certainly I can’t remember one where sequence really matters being released recently – while that’s not to say they’re not out there (as I’m sure they are) it just doesn’t seem to be that relevant these days.
As a point of reference, right now I’m mostly listening to a shuffled playlist of the new Metallica (ok, not great), Fujiya & Miyagi (promising) and the new TV On The Radio. A pretty diverse bunch, but it works – none of these albums need you to listen to them in one go, none suffer for being part of a playlist.
However – and as referenced at the start – the TV On The Radio album (‘Dear Science,’ comma and all) is something different, something special. It’s only the second album this year that I’ve been motivated to break out of the clutter of a playlist (the other being Portishead) and listen on its own. It’s a superb piece of work, and holds together as a whole extremely well.
I still listen to it on shuffle, though.
As a parting gift, here’s the track ‘DLZ’ from the album – possibly a career highlight:
DLZ.mp3 (5.3MB MP3)
Comments
chimpomatic said at Sep 16, 11:48 AM:
I ONLY listen to albums, except when I’m feeling really indecisive, then I hit shuffle for a hour ….only to find some more albums to listen to.
Graham said at Sep 16, 09:25 PM:
I listen to full albums almost exclusively. The only exceptions are listening to individual tracks when for some reason there is a particular one I’m thinking of, which isn’t often, and when I listen to a playlist someone else has made.
There’s something about listening to an album that just shuffling through your favourite tracks misses – I like knowing first few bars of the next track before it starts, and I like hearing the full diversity of an artist’s music, not just my favourite songs of theirs.
I think it’s difficult to tell when an album’s “designed as an album” – after all, there must be at least some reasoning behind why they put their “series of tracks” in that order. I think of it as listening to it the way it was meant to be heard – it’s not necessarily the best way to listen to those tracks, but it feels like the “right” way.
Fake Kop Boss said at Sep 17, 01:18 AM:
I’m 38 now and stopped listening to albums at the end of the 90s. I think Pulp’s This is Hardcore was the last album I could enjoy as such. Oh, and Foo Fighters are the only band I can listen to post 2000 all albumn through.
As a teen in the 80s albums like Propaganda’s “A Secret Wish” and Japan’s “Tin Drum” felt like exotic collages of music and mystery to delve into; I used to live in those albums. They literally kept me sane.
I think for me the decline of the album has been due, in part, to concentration problems, the emergnce of “shuffles” and the hegemony of late-capitalism.
We’re programmed to consume at a rabid rate nowadays because consumption fuels our desire to purchase. Music has fallen into this process. At least, mainstream music.
It’s in capitalism’s interests for us to consume as many songs as possible, preferably as quickly as possible.
The underlying structure in the music industry today is grazing fragments to appeal to all our senses, tastes and pleasures. Getting lost for weeks in an album isn’t in the interest of the industry.
Is it a case of the technology shaping our listening habits or our desire for better, shinier, happier, more varied tunes what fuels technology?
Jon Hicks said at Sep 17, 08:25 AM:
I’m still a predominantly album listener, I like to hear how the artist has arranged the songs, and get peeved if the track order is messed up in iTunes. Very occasionally I create a playlist, but tend to shuffle as a way of discovering tracks that I’ve missed or ignored.
Jared Christensen said at Sep 17, 02:47 PM:
I also listen to albums almost exclusively, shuffling only when I don’t know what I want to listen to (and then shuffling usually leads me to listen to an album I’d forgotten).
I feel like you’re talking about two different things here. There’s the ‘concept album’ where themes, melodies and ideas thread between songs. It’s a conscious effort at creating a single entity with a singular theme. Then there’s the traditional album, which is a collection of songs which may or may not share similar themes, but do consider how songs fit together and may tell a story to some extent.
To me, both of these album archetypes have value. I have actually downloaded albums in the past and been able, without ever hearing the songs before, to tell that they are out of sequence. Most of these albums are of the second vriety that I mentioned.
I’m pretty sure I’m in the minority with my listen-to-albums-from-the-first-to-last-track mentality. Which saddens me, because I think a lot of artists really pay attention to how their songs fit together.
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