[I didn't read the article, but] I think the move to buying songs one-at-a-time has hurt the whole 'album' concept, including long intros, long interludes, and the idea of a body of work that builds on a theme.
Anecdotally, we've seen whole-album concepts become big hits in recent years: Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, Kanye West's Life of Pablo, Chance the Rapper's Coloring Book, etc.
On top of that, almost all hip-hop songs these days have intro tags (which producers worked on the song.) Not instrumental of course, but non-song content none-the-less.
Pay-per-song encouraged playlists and "greatest hits" type mix CDs, but didn't encourage anyone to purchase B-sides or interstitial tracks. At least with services like Spotify et al, you aren't paying per track, so you have the option of listening to a whole album as a single body of work.
Of course, not everyone wants to do that, which is cool.
All the albums I've sold have had a clear narrative thread going through it, while all the random assortments I did early on never sold.
I have a hunch that it's not streaming that's really responsible, per se, but the "Shuffle" function that's been available since the CD player. I tend to have a large playlist and more often than not, I set it to shuffle the tracks. But I did essentially the same thing when I had a 60 CD changer years ago, too. I think this trend probably started there, accelerated when MP3s and ripped CDs became popular (prior to steaming services) and streaming is just the next step in that progression.
The way we consume other media is likely to part of this as well, so saying it's streaming is perhaps a bit of a stretch even if streaming makes it possible to jump more easily.
(for the record I have not read the article, though I scanned it to be sure they were talking about streaming services).
Also, "Eruption"/"Running with the Devil", too.
Also, CD singles were collectors items, because they would often come with bonus tracks that weren't available on the album or anywhere else. Sometimes they were just live recordings, but sometimes they were fully produced studio recordings that didn't quite make the cut for the album, but were still amazing. (Nirvana's "Even In His Youth" jumps to mind, as well as The Prodigy & Tom Morello collaboration "No Man Army".) I still remember my local 2nd-hand CD shop selling a rare Nirvana CD single for $100, and as a kid wishing I could afford to buy it.
But they were never very popular.
It has however wrecked my attention span which I’m trying to fix. I bought a CD player with a monitor output and some CDs and some nice headphones. I can actually enjoy my favourite albums now.
If you want to avoid this, just don’t listen to popularity based radios like spotify. EDIT: Apparently it's not popularity based. I still find it's difficult to avoid single-oriented contemporary music. Ironically I've found pandora to be pretty good at this.
Just ordered two new vinyl LPs this month :)
I think limited storage space on mp3 players did more to damage albums than digital purchases.
Napster, etc. also encouraged a shift to individual songs before iTunes took off.
In any case, for the most part, people were weaned off of the album concept which, after all, was a construct that was primarily a function of how music was delivered and sold.