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Comment by z_open | Hacker News Reader

It's nice they have this freedom, but for a while now, it's been harder and harder to find a truly coherent album. Something that you can leave on and feels like a single piece of work.

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I would say the current situation is better than the 90s, in which the CD pushed acts to make albums far longer than they had any sense being (despite being an amazing period for hip hop, it's hard to sit through a lot of the very best acts albums). Acts now have the freedom to make things whatever length they feel suits. Minor releases can be album length, major releases can be EP length, it's all whatever people want to make it.

The biggest issue right now is that gameifying streaming is leading to similar issues (Chris Brown's 5 disc album being an extreme example) but Kanye West's series of 20 minutes albums points towards another direction that could be a much better fit for the modern musician (making an album that's so concise that it results in the listener playing the whole thing over and over instead of just adding their favourite song to a playlist.

Depends on who you're listening to. Most big names rely on streaming plays so you're probably not going to get it there but you can kinda drop the shitty songs and understand what the album could have been. It difficult to make a coherent album with 20 songs but that is what major labels are requiring these days.

I think Bandana by Freddie Gibbs & Madlib is a great example of a full and coherent album I've loved this year. Lots of indie rockers, metal, jazz and experimental EDM musicians are still making great full albums

Bandana is probably my fave of the year so far. Lots of great albums this year:

- JPEGMAFIA "All My Heroes Are Cornballs"

- IDK "Is He Real?"

- Earthgang "Mirrorland"

- Lewis Capaldi "Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent"

- slowthai "Nothing Great About Britain"

- Dave "PSYCHODRAMA"

- Benny the Butcher "The Plugs I Met"

- Cate le Bon "Reward"

- Denzel Curry "ZUU"

- Flume "Hi This Is Flume"

- Gesaffelstein "Hyperion"

- Kota the Friend "FOTO"

and there are several upcoming releases I'm quite hyped for.

Agree to all of this. These artists, besides maybe Flume, are exactly the size / popularity of what I was talking about in my post.

Sure, but I think "the album" was a side effect of LP/CD era constraints.

Those days are over, and it's a new modern world. As always :)

Sure, but those "constraints" could be compared to switching from a piece of letter paper to a canvas. The modern "liberations" would be having a box of a million tiny artistic legos which are getting tinier and tinier.

In all situations you want the best piece of art, it's not entirely clear to me that a million hand-painted legos is superior to an artist's canvas painting. Sure, it's a lot easier to grab all the blue legos and have 30 hours of deep house, but it's very difficult to end up with starry night, with bits of euphoric light trance and depressing shadow dub melded together into your blue canvas, unless you go back to your 1980s flirting skills and spend 20 hours making a thoughtful mixtape.

I would even argue that the memory of "the album" is some instance of the Survivorship Bias. We fondly remember the great albums, forgetting the large amounts of bad or average albums from the past.

Yeah, the "extended single" albums, that had the one good hit song and 11 crappy tracks, will not be missed.

I'd say that's more of a genre problem than a streaming problem. Metal and less-commercial rock styles still have the album model as king. I hear hiphop tends to follow that too.

I'm not sure there were many of these to begin with. I love albums like that, but I think most seemingly coherent "pop" albums of the past followed basic rules of upbeat/downbeat flow with a very loose "common" theme. That can be accomplished with a simple mix tape, doesn't really matter who does each track.

> it's been harder and harder to find a truly coherent album

Not really. Just look through stuff from the 1970's.

I guess the album is dead

Not at all true, many of the new rap scene has some very cohesive albums. Brockhampton saturation 1-3 have very clear beginning and ends, JPEGMAFIA's new album is a clean 42 minute experience. The album is not dead. Its just the audience listening to it

Edit: This expands past these two bands, I'm giving two small examples in a large field that I listen to. I think artists are leaning toward either singles that get tons of airplay or albums that get listen time drawn out because the album is cohesive. Its two different styles of listening,and both are being catered. You can have a one off single that one group of people love, and another group that can't listen to that single outside of the album. Streaming services have done a good job at allowing this to happen.

Major label guy here. Not quite. While this isn’t as important for a lot of artists, on the top (like megastar-level: Drake, Post Malone, etc.), it’s still a huge money maker. More tracks means more streams which means more revenue. The waterfall is effective, but the album is still important. Especially in the release week.

What about cohesion in the album? I guess that prog-rock/indie/hiphop themed albums thing isn't very common in general these days, I'd be surprised to see one today from any new artist.

The intros and skits would never fit into streaming properly, especially with the ranking algorithms. Nothing worse than getting some random intro skit come up on a recommended playlist!

Spotify should run some detection algorithms on songs to not recommend the intros/skits, or the uploader can explicitly mark them for exclusion, which would help boost their singles and not push unhelpful songs

I'm a big fan of artists releasing each song as it's made, with each having cover art and maybe a backup song. They . can still package them up in a full album for charting and full album sales.

Spotify uses peoples manual playlists to drive some recommendations. If two songs are on a playlist together they’re probably similar. In the same way, if a song isn’t on any playlists, like you’d expect a skit not to be, then they don’t recommend it.

Free human curation of stuff that goes well on playlists.

Perhaps, but I still think we're a long way away from, say, something like "Dark Side of the Moon" being a viable approach anymore. I don't miss albums so much as cohesive, long-form genuinely artistic statements... (Fancy way of saying concept albums).

Only if you listen to Top 50. The metal world is still going strong with album oriented albums

Metal and rock both put out some great albums still. And I still look forward to those releases to just experience half an hour of (mostly) new content all at once.

OTOH, Taylor Swift also just released a new album. So there's definitely still albums being made in the "top 50" as well.

With pop music, it arguably has been for some time.

Could we see much longer album-esque songs in the future?

AFAIK all streaming services pay per play (of more than 30s). So no, they incentivise the exact opposite of "longer album-esque songs". A single 30mn song would earn the same as a 2:30 song, and would be unlikely to have the early catchy hook which ensures it passes the 30s mark for a payout.

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