This is one of those "the medium is the message" things. The album per se became a widespread art form because the message of LPs is the album. It's how you experience that medium. It was preceded by an era of long-form live high-art music and short-song-focused popular music, in early mass reproduced recordings and as played by folk and popular musicians—when we got LPs we started collecting those haphazardly onto albums for convenience, then artists began crafting the LPs as their own, whole works, or at least paying close attention to song arrangement and selection on them.
We're back to a world of disconnected songs, in some ways. It's not uncommon for an artist to release a bunch of singles then just, later, collect those into a nominal "album" for physical sales, like the earliest days of LPs. Some artists seem to only release singles for streaming (I see this a lot in off-mainstream hiphop). I think only the idea and marketing power of the thematic album-tour is really keeping the form of the album alive as a shaping force for music.
> We're back to a world of disconnected songs, in some ways. It's not uncommon for an artist to release a bunch of singles then just, later, collect those into a nominal "album" for physical sales
As my parents have often informed me, an album on which you liked two of the songs was a good one, and one on which you liked three was a great one. Mostly you bought an album for a single track that was on there. But, publishers would frequently release "greatest hits" albums consolidating many popular songs onto the same album.
This seems to be basically identical to the system you describe that we have now, except that in the "single track" phase of the process, the track costs $1 instead of $15.
Yeah, despite me missing the positive experiences, I definitely would buy albums as a teenager and end up hating most of it. I remember really disliking Light Grenades by Incubus, for example, after buying it purely because of a song I heard on the radio.
I think the reason that Dark Side of the Moon, for example, is so loved is in no small part because it is was well tailored to be an album. The songs blend in to each other, there are repeated motifs throughout the album, it comes together as one big cohesive unit, and as such I can't really listen to "one song" on it, I usually have to put on the whole album (or at least side 2).
Yeah, totally, it's not like all listening was to albums crafted as albums, and there's some hindsight-benefit where modern listeners who like vinyl favor the albums that succeeded at being an album-as-artform and ignore the ones that only had like two good tracks. Plus, radio, jukeboxes, and 45s existed at the same time as LPs.
Well, yeah. Even at the time, there was far far more music published than anyone could buy, especially considering the existing back catalogs. Why wouldn't you just buy the good stuff? This isn't 'cheating.'
If you were/are careful in your purchases, you could/can find plenty of albums that are wall-to-wall magic. Some that I enjoyed in my youth:
- Beatles, Revolver
- Beastie Boys, Ill Communication
- Led Zeppelin IV
- Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy
- Metallica, self-titled ("Black Album")
- Nirvana, Nevermind
- Pearl Jam, Ten
- Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
- Radiohead, OK Computer
- Snoop Dogg, Doggystyle
- Weezer, self-titled ("Blue Album")
We're back to a world of disconnected songs, in some ways. It's not uncommon for an artist to release a bunch of singles then just, later, collect those into a nominal "album" for physical sales, like the earliest days of LPs. Some artists seem to only release singles for streaming (I see this a lot in off-mainstream hiphop). I think only the idea and marketing power of the thematic album-tour is really keeping the form of the album alive as a shaping force for music.