Is the era of "The Album" really over?

Barbel

Being in what is euphemistically referred to as late middle-age, I grew up in the time of the concept album- where the songs aren't just individual 3-minute pieces but combine to tell a story.

Examples:
Pink Floyd- The Wall
The Who- Tommy
Elton John- Captain Fantastic & The Brown Dirt Cowboy
Genesis- The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway

It seems to me that no-one does this any more, and that's a shame. At it's best, the concept album tells a story akin to that of a feature film (and it's not a coincidence that some of these have been filmed). Perhaps it's simply a sign of the times that attention spans have shortened and people just don't have the patience to sit through (say) 70 or 80 minutes of music.

Or am I wrong?

Thunderpussy

I too think the concept album has gone ! As everyone nowadays downloads which tracks they like
And omit the ones they don't like. ( I know I do ) , only a couple of nights ago, I bought ( downloaded )
A few old songs that I'd wanted for a while.

Matt S

It's sadly not the way most people listen to music. Pop music only cares about singles, especially since people now can so easily purchase individual tracks. It's so rare for someone to compose a long-form work. Jazz still comes in the form of albums, since singles are irrelevant. Listening to a whole album in jazz is like listening to a set. I wouldn't just pop into a club for a drink and leave after the first tune. I'll stay to hear the whole set, and that's how I feel when I put on a jazz album. I tend to listen to all pop music in the way I listen to jazz, in trying to find the merit in every song on an album. But I don't listen to any recent pop music, so I can't say how current albums in pop music are. I'd assume they're all as bad as the single everyone only wants to hear.

Loeffelholz

The 'a la carte' era of music - song by song - is a powerful force today. The resurgence of vinyl has given new life to the older music, but major labels monopolize the limited vinyl pressing infrastructure, and so independent acts are probably less inclined to pursue things such as long-form musical structure The most recent example I can think of is Green Day's "21st Century Breakdown," from several years ago.

Time will tell. It's a great musical art form. I hope it survives.

Chriscoop

I think the odd one will be made, but probably not in 10 years
Muse tend to release an album that runs along a theme, maybe not strictly like a concept album like the wall, which coincidently I was educating my daughters about on the weekend, they can't seem to grasp why pink is on trial, but as I keep saying, "listen to whole album, it will make sense if you actually listen to it"
What does disturb me is how my kids struggle to listen to one song in its entirety! I've now banned my 12 year old from connecting up to the car stereo as I get 50 second blasts of songs before she moves on. I'm not sure the yoof of today have the concentration span for a full album.

Barbel

Someone who does still do this- Mike Oldfield. I should have thought of him earlier. He's recently released "Return To Ommadawn", a sequel to his third album from the 70s. It makes a change from him recycling "Tubular Bells".

James Suzuki

Radiohead's latest effort 'A Moon Shaped Pool' and Enya's 'Dark Sky Island' have themes and sounds throughout the whole album. The latter is all about being able to see the stars at night

caractacus potts

the moment of the album was a blip in history, the creative result of a once-new format that has long since been superceded
too bad, I too am of a certain age and my favourite music is those prog rock concept albums of the 70s

the first 50 years or so of recorded music were defined by the 78rpm record, which is why to this day we still expect a pop song to be 3 minutes (prior to that of course music was a live experience, theoretically unconstrained by time)
the 33 1/3 rpm LP was first introduced in 1948, although the format had been in development since the early thirties ... like TV, there needed to be an affluent middle class for there to be a market
so Sinatra and others quickly started exploring the new format to make musical statements that could not have been possible with the single, and jazz musicians like Duke, Miles, Mingus etc were finally able to stretch out

but even through the 60s, for rocknroll singles were more popular than albums, since the main audience was teenagers with limited allowance budgets
it wasn't really til the 70s the album became the ubiquitous format, Led Zep and Pink Floyd in particular made a big deal about being albums-only artists, but the fact is for that one decade all artists were albums-artists, and most singles were edited versions of album tracks
thus for that brief golden moment the artistic statement was the 45 minute album with beginning middle and end, with sideflips, and all-important album cover art

by the end of the decade the single was already making a comeback, thanks to punk rock and 12" disco remixes
then MTV made the video the main thing, albums were just packages of songs better represented by their videos
even formerly album oriented artists like Bowie or Peter Gabriel were now putting out albums that were merely the sum of their parts

the rise of the CD further undermined the album format, with its 80minute time constraint that most artists struggled to fill (it turned out that 20 minute sideflip was important for attention spans)
what became more important was the presence of bonus tracks and multiple variant remixes, and then there was the programmability that meant listeners could define their own favoured playback sequence of the set of songs theyd just bought
for me, the CD was really more appropriate for live albums and compilations than for the type of 70s concept albums we're lamenting

this was all well before the rise of filesharing and streaming, I remember both Bowie and Eno saying in the 90s that the album was obsolete, that technology now allowed them to produce multiple versions of any piece and release them all to the public via the web, allowing the audience to listen to their own compilations any way they choose
so that's it, a muchloved format was just the creative result of a temporary phase in technology, really only relevant for a decade or so, and irrelevant now for much longer than that ... no shame in that, I like old movie serials, pulp fiction, and radio plays as well ... a new format is a challenge that fosters creativity and that's where great art comes from

Loeffelholz

For my own part, I have gravitated back to the 33 1/3-rpm platters of my younger days. There's a lot of joy there. I've just (mostly) completed an acquisition run of essential Pink Floyd vinyl. Obscured by Clouds is still in my crosshairs...

Newer and 'indie' acts are struggling to find a foothold. IMO, they'd be well-advised to try and follow the long form structure.

Chriscoop

My dad was an elo fan and I loved looking at his albums, all opened like books to reveal spectacular artwork. Out of the blue with the spaceship was my favourite as a child. The artwork really was something I looked forward to, another favourite of mine over the years has been iron maidens zombie eddy, he changes guise on each cover to tie in to the album title or subject matter. As someone who now downloads I miss the notes and artwork.

Barbel

{[] Sad creature that I am, I used to enjoy the notes & artwork while listening to the album.

Chriscoop

Well that makes two of us Barbel. Infact I spent hours looking at the inside of elo album while listening to it, all the astronauts were members of the band


Even cd's continued this on for me, I was really pleased the wall cd had all scarfes caricatures, I made a study of those for my art class gcse and made clay representations of a few. Of course for some bands having all the lyrics also was a great help. Buying a new album I would get home, put it on then thumb through the sleeves while listening.

Barbel

{[] So, what we're saying is there's more to an album than just (say) 12 songs in one package.

Chriscoop

{[] Absolutely, some albums are a sensory journey, pink Floyd are mostly best experienced at a decent volume through headphones, they're pulse album with the flashing led was art in itself, and an assault of the senses.

Sir Hillary Bray

I too lament the loss of the album as the prime delivery vehicle for popular music. Barbel, the examples you cite in your first post are more what I would call "concept albums" -- true long-form stories, basically novels (or in the case of CFATBDC, an autobiography) set to music. But even "regular" albums are so much more than a collection of songs. I can never really suss a story arc in Dark Side of the Moon, but hearing the tracks as a set, in order, is so much more satisfying than, say, hearing "Money" on the radio. And how about something like Revolver, which doesn't require songs to be played in order, yet is clearly a cohesive set, if for no other reason than it encapsulates so perfectly just where the Beatles were as a band at that time.

Some artists still play to the "concept album" format -- Loeffelholz mentioned Green Day, and in 2009 The Decemberists released The Hazards of Love, basically a 50-minute continuous song suite broken up into "tracks" more for user convenience than anything else. I would classify The Suburbs by Arcade Fire similarly, even though it has distinct tracks. But as everyone has acknowledged, the album form has been massively deemphasized by the economics and technology of popular music consumption.

Still, most of my music is in full album form, even the newer music I buy electronically. The deep cuts are usually better than the more recognized ones.

Barbel

Sir Hillary Bray wrote:

Barbel, the examples you cite in your first post are more what I would call "concept albums" .

Yes, I said that! )

Thunderpussy

"Now that's what I call music 48" , now that is a classic album.

Sir Hillary Bray

Barbel wrote:

Sir Hillary Bray wrote:

Barbel, the examples you cite in your first post are more what I would call "concept albums" .

Yes, I said that! )

Yikes, I need to read a little more closely!

Napoleon Plural

Er, did anyone catch yesterday's History of the Vinyl LP or some such thing on BBC4? In the evening, obv. Should be on iPlayer, not sure how our friends across the pond could see it. It was interesting stuff, and it was a surprise to learn how important Dylan was in popularising the format for pop and rock, as his folk albums were quality stuff, not just the hit single and some filler and covers thrown in. I know the Beatles were a bit tasty too, but I think Dylan got there first, according to this.

It was followed by a doc on the Singles, I didn't see all of that.

Barbel

Didn't see that, which is a pity cos I think I'd have enjoyed it very much. Will try to track it down.