alt Hacker NewsWe've seen a steady shift in music over the past 2 decades from full length albums, to single hits, to artificially generated.
Surely there's some gained and some lost. But coming from the era of buying an entire album, spending time reading the CD booklets and art, and listening to 10 songs which tell a larger story ---- what's being lost really hits home.
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I really don't think we have. When I was growing up in the 90s it was the heyday of the pop single but there were still plenty of albums being produced and I think it's the same today.
Artists have actually been moving back to the full album with goodies, even in mainstream pop with Beyoncé, Rosalia, RAYE, Charli XCX to name a few.
There is another new trend now that some artists are doing album concerts, where the set list follows one of their albums. I thought that was cool.. probably as a reaction, on how to bring back the album in a way.
music has been a product of its form factor for a long time. It's no coincidence that the wax cylinder, 78, 45, 33, cassette, CD, and mp3 dictated changes in how music was packaged (single, lp, ep, album, b sides) and the average length of a popular song.
Good thing music as a topic is diverse and people are doing all kinds of things. But yes, commercially distributed mass-consumption music is influenced by its packaging and distribution ... obviously.
charts will become totally meaningless.
Event data will be what matters most. That's how artists actually make their revenue these days anyways.
I feel like in those days I really didn’t appreciate albums. Storage was a premium so I would focus on bands greatest hits songs vs discographies. Both in terms of my burned cd collections and early mp3. I didn’t start getting into albums until terabyte hard drives were cheaper. Then I started pirating discographies and listening to the back catalog for the first time.
You're only describing pop music. Thankfully this is a tiny fraction of all music.
One can still buy artisan albums created by independent singers/bands. But they tend to get lost in the marketing/influencer noise and thus do not get worldwide success. As a result you have to search harder for them.
This comment is like 20 years out of date haha. People shifted to single hits when the iTunes store was selling songs for 99 cents. Now (and by now I mean for over a decade) we’re in the age of streaming, and you can easily access whole albums with zero friction. It’s the best time ever for the full listen through experience. And artists are responding by releasing long albums.
What I do think is lost these days is listening to the save album over and over again.