Does the concept of an "album" still matter?

[Gilbertk]

I'm noticing

with the last few posters...

 

 

[Stormtron]

QUOTE (rushgoober @ Jun 10 2012, 04:04 PM)

No offense, my brother,  but this post makes me kind of sad.  I think something huge here has been lost that cannot be regained. An album to me is a piece of art, compiled and put together in a very specific way to account for flow and balance, and it's far from just a collection of songs.  That's why artists do shows thematically, based on recent works and museums have exhibitions based on subject or theme.  A concept album only magnifies the importance of a piece of art as a complete whole, but even albums that aren't conceptual needs to work as a whole.  Even the artwork is important. Without these things, it really is just a collection of songs, and that just doesn't seem right to me.  An album is not 8 or 10 or 12 singles and b-sides sandwiched together randomly, it's a unified whole.

[ucsteve667]

QUOTE (Gilbertk @ Jun 11 2012, 08:10 AM)

I'm noticing something in common with the last few posters...

I wasnt that cute...

[trenken]

Everything is heading towards digital distribution. Not just music. This is starting to happen with videogames, movies, everything. At some point there wont be a such thing as physical media anymore.

 

That's just the natural progression of things that's been taking place for years and becoming more prevalent as each year goes by.

 

Ive completely embraced it and totally fine with it. I dont buy CDs anymore. If the iTunes version of this album comes with a PDF booklet, Ill buy that over the CD. Im not going to be one of those people fighting against progress that just gets left behind and resorts to searching vintage shops years from now still looking for CDs.

 

Just as only some bands produce vinyls now, and usually not even that many of them, that will be the case with CDs years from now once DD has completely taken over. You'll always be able to buy all the songs on an album so I dont see how it even matters. Its not like bands are just releasing songs here and there. They're still writing a full albums worth of songs and always will, its just that you now have a choice to only buy the ones you like if you want. No big deal.

[metaldad]

I have my i-pod on shuffle all the time, if i want to hear a full album, i can. What is so hard ?

[snowdog212]

QUOTE (Shreddy Lee @ Jun 10 2012, 02:29 PM)

One of the ways music has changed a great deal over the past few decades is in the idea of the album. I grew up as the sort of digital revolution of music was taking over, and everything was moving to downloading MP3s and all that, though I did use CDs briefly. So to me, an album is simply the collection of songs that are on it. Nothing more. I place all the importance on the songs themselves, and I've never really had any notion of considering an album as one whole work, how the songs "flow" and thinking about how or if they affect one another, the song order, etc. I understand that this is exactly how it used to be, and for some still is, but I feel like to me and likely most of my generation, this is a foreign idea. When I evaluate an album, what I'm really thinking about is how many songs on it I like vs. how many I don't. It comes down to math, really. If I think most of the songs are good, and there's few to none that I don't think are that good, then it's a good album to me. How it flows, and all these other types of things that I often see people talking about, don't enter my mind. To me it's just, here's all the new songs this band has made, one after the other. So, do you place importance on how an album fits together as a whole, how the songs flow and complement each other, etc? If so, why? Is it because you grew up during the era where that was the norm, and are just used to it? If not, why not? And most importantly, is this way of thinking about an album still relevant today?

I listen to them as a bunch of songs Do not care what the story is as long as I enjoy the tunes