Since the beginning of recorded music, there have been albums. The idea of an artist releasing a full body of work to their fans is as old as the music industry itself. But in the last few years, we have seen artists and consumers alike begin to reject the idea of a studio full-length and opting for a more diverse and eclectic way of buying and producing music. So are we seeing the beginning of the end for the album?
To understand this transition, you have understand what the reasoning behind the album was in the beginning. Before the boom of popular music in the 1950s, albums were all you could buy. While radio station and clubs would still play individual singles, these were treated as promotional teasers, convincing you to invest in the artist's full repertoire of the time. Singles eventually became a commodity in their own right as labels began to adhere to demand from the public who would rather just have the one song at the fraction of the price. This of course led to the multiple release style for an album that continues to this day. Labels will push out a number of tracks from an album over a number of weeks, allowing the more keen members of an artist's fanbase to buy up single songs before they inevitably ran out to buy the album on release day.
But thanks to the internet and numerous steaming services, the album has become less and less in demand. Music download sites such as iTunes have allowed users to pick and choose the songs they want from an album instead of buying the whole lot, and since Spotify, many users don't even listen to most of the release. In fact, the streaming service recently announced that albums were not being listened to as much as their in-built playlists. Showing that listeners now are more likely to want to hear a varied collection of artists rather than one single act at a time.
But it is not just us that is beginning to change the game when it comes to an artist's output. For the last decade, the electronic community has almost completely done away with the format all together. The platinum-selling artist Duke Dumont has released a flurry of tracks including two number singles with no album at all. This idea of releasing small doses of material whenever you can has recently been adopted by Royksopp, who devastated fans in 2014 by announcing their "final" album. But they weren't breaking up, just letting go of the album format and have since been releasing tracks in single form.
Probably the most high-profile artist to back out of albums has been Kanye West. Although he has since clarified that he will no longer be releasing albums in a physical form, which means nothing but downloads from here on in. But what Kanye has been doing with his latest full-length 'The Life Of Pablo' has intrigued and angered many music puritans, and opened up the whole idea of what an album is.
Since its release last year, 'The Life Of Pablo' has been altered a number of times. Sometimes adding new tracks, extending existing ones, and even dividing them up into small snippets. This idea of changing the album after its release is an unprecedented move for an artist to make. For years, we have been used to the idea of an album as a finished product. Artists will normally tuck themselves away in a studio for months on end, eventually emerging with a dozen or so songs, which will then become their fans only point of reference to them for the next couple of years. So the idea of modifying it later certainly jars our normal experiences.
But what this shows is that some artists would rather continue to produce new music whenever they want. Rather than forcing out their creative process once every few years, we are beginning to see artists showing us their work as they produce it. Offering up what they have to show, any time the mood suits them. And while it gives the labels far more work to do, the artists themselves, and ultimately the public, seem to be the ones on the winning end of this revolution. Musicians can now feel free that their art is no longer under this veil of "over-exposure." We as consumers are not bored by the artists we love and I'm sure that if Beyonce were releasing a new song every month for the next ten years, they would still gather the same interest as any that she has produced in the past.
So while the industry may not be ready to bin the album just yet, as more and more high-profile acts begin to shift that work ethic into this kind of dynamic, we could soon be seeing a whole new way of music making its way into our homes.