In 2009, another new technology was threatening music, but Radiohead had a solution.
https://www.loudersound.com/features/radiohead-split-rumour-2009
Reading this article, I pondered my continuing dismissal of ‘single’ recordings. I always listen to albums, and don’t add singles to my streaming library, and generally don’t listen to an artist if they only have singles available.
An example is the virtuoso bassist Charles Berthoud. He presently has 27 listings on Amazon Music, and just 4 are albums and an EP. He hasn’t issued an album for several years.
Why am I so firmly lodged with the album concept? Maybe the songs aren’t even meant by the artist to be any more than an accumulation that can be packaged for around an hour of listening. My mindset is still that an album is a collection of related recordings.
The single method of release allows artists to make their work available when it is ready, much as I write blog posts as and when I have something to say.
It’s another liberating aspect of streaming, as music recordings no longer have to be carried by physical discs (units of carrying capacity) for distribution. Economy of scale doesn’t apply when streaming files online.
More than 20 years ago, I was under some professional pressure (as a university academic) to write books (I wrote two, and edited several collections of others’ writings), but also published almost 100 journal articles and more than 200 journal papers. So, I understand that completing a 6,000 word project is more manageable than a 400-page book. The creative dynamic is quite different when each composition stands in its own right rather than as an element of something much bigger.
I still enjoy albums as an extended listening experience, though. I have never created a playlist comprising singles from lots of artists.
It seems that listening to full albums has some health benefits.
“According to The Sun newspaper, in a poll conducted by the Entertainment Retailers Association in 2019, 83 percent of respondents revealed that they use LPs to help them relax. It turns out that playing an LP’s tracks in order from start to finish beats stress more than gardening or a movie, according to the poll. Only reading and binge eating ranked higher for adults attempting to chill out from potential stress.
Geoff Taylor of the British Phonographic Industry, added, “Music is a wonderful way to relax, but its benefits can go much deeper when the listener really takes the time to slow down and immerse themselves in the whole album as the songwriter intended.”
Dr. Julia Jones, who has studied music’s effects on health, suggested that playing a “low-tempo relaxing album” before bed could help ease the listener into “sleep mode.”
With streaming, downloads and singles being more prominent in recent years, the poll shows good reason why the album art form is still vital.“
Music & Hi-fi Appreciations 
A very thoughtful post, Richard. I hadn’t previously given it enough consideration. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
Radiohead are a good choice for this sort of discussion. They are one of the few modern-era bands for whom the moniker ‘pioneering’ would not be hype. The fact that they hold so much antipathy to the album format, and see it as a creative straightjacket, is insightful.
Perhaps classical music gives further weight to the argument against album-sized chunking. So much of the music was written by composers before the advent of recording technology, and when one looks at their output, there is no connection other than coincidence to the duration of a modern album. There would have been the concept of a sitting, but its duration was always highly flexible to the situation, such as the musical segments in church services, to private recitals, to organised concerts. I suspect that composers gave little to no regard to duration, and when they gave regard to packaging, such as the organisation of symphonies or nocturnes, there was no right duration. So many classical music pieces exist in isolation. Their packaging is a matter of convenience. The musical traditions of other cultures only further breaks the nexus to the concept of ‘album’.
Streaming is a word that seems unnecessarily provocative to we old hands at consuming recorded music. We had our historical reasons, but today? It should mean exploratory freedom, access, and celebration without sonic compromise, but instead, we agonize. Even your quote from 2019 is superseded by today’s world of streaming, where one can simply type ‘relaxing music’ or ‘jazz chill’ etc, and get a range of impromptu playlists or even virtual ‘radio stations’ to relax to. Who needs LPs?
cheers
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Thank you for conversing.
Now that we can understand that productising music on carrier discs imposes recording content and time constraints, we can appreciate the frutrations and compomises that composers and players have to deal with. Having their music presentation ‘engineered’ (contrived) must feel like an affront to their art. Then again, all artists have to work with materials. I wouldn’t want to be a musician compelled to create to fit a piece of plastic!
For me, the answer as a listener is to go with a concept of recorded composition. in place of album, LP, CD, etc.
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