I know that the word on the street is that the album is dead but I think it’s premature, or at the very least, debatable. I think one of the problems with the album, as we know it, is that it was a product of the vinyl record. But with the passing of vinyl and the CD becoming the main medium for recorded music, artists lost the focus of what an album was or could be.
Recently, Sheryl Crow released her new album Threads and announced it would be her last album. Her reasoning was that since streaming had now become the main way that people listen to music, it was individual tracks that were important and not a full album of tracks. She said she would still record music but just release individual tracks when she felt like it. I can’t say that she’s wrong because what she says makes sense. But I still think the album has a place if done in the right way.
I think that Threads is a really good album but I also think that Sheryl lost her focus with it, and here is where the cd vs the vinyl record debate comes in. When the CD became the main medium for releasing music, we went from being able to fit 35-40 minutes of music on 2 sides of a vinyl record to being able to put 80 minutes of music on a cd. Also, the price of a cd doubled the price of a vinyl record, and artists felt that they needed to give more music for the money. So it wasn’t unusual to buy cds with over an hour’s worth of music and 15-20 songs.
I don’t care how talented you are, you’re not going to write 15-20 great songs, record them and put them all on one album. As an artist you’ll hold some back, which means some of those 15 songs will be ok to fill time and that’s why interest in albums began to fade. I know that I don’t really want to listen to more than 6 songs at a time, let alone 14-16 on a cd. Sheryl Crow’s Threads would have been a great album if she had decided to release 10-12 songs instead of the 17 that she put on it. There’s no way to focus on 17 songs in one sitting.
I stated earlier that the album was a product of the vinyl record because the medium supported the concept of an album. You had 2 sides of music to listen to, so you could only listen to 4-6 songs at a time, depending on the amount of time the songs took up. When one side of the record stops, the listener has to physically get up and put the other side on to play. Think about that, compared to listening to cds or MP3s on an iPod or streaming on Spotify, Pandora, etc.
When you look at what are considered to be classic albums, generally you get 10-12 songs on them. That’s because of the limitation of time allowed per side of the vinyl. Back in the day, the 1st and last song on each side were important, particularly the last song on Side 2. Some of those last songs on Side 2 are classics from the bands that recorded them. Take A Day In The Life from The Beatles Sgt. Peppers or We Won’t Get Fooled Again from The Who’s Who’s Next LP. These songs became classics because of what came before them on the album.
I’m not saying that these songs don’t stand on their own, but if they were released today as individual tracks for streaming, I don’t think they would have the same impact. That’s why the album is so important to the artist. That’s also why vinyl is important. An artist can release 5 or 6 unrelated songs on one side of an album and put 5 or 6 songs with a central theme on the other side to make a statement. It’s working within the limitation of the vinyl that gives an artist more freedom than stacking one song after another on a cd.
So is the album really dead? I don’t think so and I offer up the resurgence in vinyl records as proof. The comeback of vinyl will keep the album alive and kicking for years to come. It just goes to show that the “old school” way of doing things like analog recording to tape, vinyl records, etc. will never really go out of style, allowing a new generation of musicians and artists a chance to innovate and put their own brand on making records now and in the future.