In praise of the album

I'm writing this blog in response to a recent blog 'Eclecticism and what makes a good album' by the electronica artist Dementio13 on his website. The blog started me thinking about the reason why the album still exists in an age of digital music; the point is made several times in the blog and subsequent comments that the album isn't as important as it used to be. When its so easy to pick and choose, download only your favourite tracks, and play them in whichever context you want, what is the point of an artist putting out an 'album' rather than just 'a collection of tracks'? I'm going to make the declaration straight away that I don't think I'm ever going to stop listening to albums as albums. I very rarely put my ipod on shuffle, when I decide to listen to an artist, I generally listen to one of their albums or EPs, front to back. This definitely makes me a more demanding listener - an artist can have great tracks, but if they fail to put an album together without a few tracks that need to be skipped, either due to the quality or due to them being completely out of place in the collection, I'm likely to listen to the artist much less than I would otherwise. I'm aware that I may be unusual in listening like this, but I don't think I'm unique, and the important point I want to make here is that I feel I get more out of the music by listening to it this way. This might be one reason why my favourite artists are all good at this. I get frustrated with them when an album is just that bit too long, or contains a few weak tracks that should really have been left out. People can of course listen to music however they want, as a random shuffled collection of tracks or whatever. But as a fan of the album, I think they are losing something fairly significant by doing that if the artist has released the tracks as a coherent whole. The best albums really are a lot more than [...]

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