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Comment by zjaffee | Hacker News Reader

I think what the CEO is saying, and it has been an increasing trend in music for a long time now, is moving even further away from large LP releases every few years. The existence of that medium of music doesn't make sense in the current year given how people actually go about consuming music.

The way to keep fans engaged involves releasing EPs and Single on a regular basis, releasing a whole album only really makes sense in the context of trying to produce it for artistic value, not fan engagement value.

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LP's or long form collections by artists capture a moment in that artist's creative point. Typically, the cycle was release a record, tour a bunch, write new music, and repeat. This meant by the time that next LP came along, the collection of songs on there could sound fairly different as the artist changed, got better, heard new songs and got inspired etc.

Then there's the recording and engineering challenges around mixing and mastering an album. Albums need to sound cohesive even if the songs aren't necessarily the same genre even. The best albums are those ones that flow between softer or more upbeat music but still feel tied together as a whole.

Forcing artists to pump out strings of singles and EPs diminishes music as an artform. It takes away the format that's allowed some of the best modern music to be created that likely would never have been created if artists were just constantly pumping out individual disconnected songs.

Even today, you can still find some pretty amazing albums that are being made where each song individually would stand as less, but together as an album they come together to make some great art.

These full-length albums have long turned into the exception though, which is kind of sad. Zeppelin IV, Sgt. Pepper or Dark Side of the Moon would never become hits today under these artistic limitations.

Only with certain kinds of music. Dance and club music has always kind of been like that. The whole culture of that music is around singles and EPs. I think the thing is, that kind of music is the 'popular money making' music these days.

But even amongst that music, you can still find some albums, being produced as such, with the intention of it being an album. It's harder to find and I doubt it makes money through services like Spotify, but on places like bandcamp, or independent label storefronts you can find plenty of albums in a wide variety of genres.

The best thing we can do is support those artists and keep buying that music if that's what we want. As long as there's a market for it, it can keep existing despite Spotify.

I completely agree with you from the perspective of being a fan of music for music's sake. Listening to a well put together album is fantastic, but that isn't the be all end all of music.

Music in the current age is equal parts pop culture as it is listening aesthetics. For an artist to thrive financially they have long had to take the first path rather than primarily focus on the later.

The artists all producing the top songs on spotify are doing so through the release of singles here and there and it makes total sense given the cultural context for how music is consumed and discovered in the current year.

I agree with what you said about albums as a cohesive piece of art, I will miss that for sure.

> Forcing artists to pump out strings of singles and EPs

But who is forcing the artists? The market? It's clear people don't want to listen to LPs released every 3-4 years, they want singles and EPs released frequently. If it is indeed a market effect, then artists need to evolve or perish. If you want to make money selling art, you need to make it in a way that people want to buy it. It's that simple.

Just because there is more money is chicken McNuggets doesn’t mean they are better than fine dining.

This is just the death of another art form.

Death?

One of the things that happens when consumers have options they didn't before is previously invisible preferences become expressible. What if the bulk of consumers never cared much about albums as coherent pieces of art? What if they only did so financially because it was the only way to get the separable pieces they did care about?

The advent of fast food has not exterminated fine dining. What's changed is that consumers have more choices. This did not signal the death of fine dining.

It's not death, it's evolution. Few things stay exactly the same over long periods of time.

Can I ask how it's clear that people don't want to listen to LPs? I think there's a percentage of people that will listen to what's popular in their playlists but there are also plenty of people who listen to LPs and are fine waiting 3-4 years. I believe more records were sold last year than in history.

You just need to be creative with the release cycle, there is nothing stopping capturing ah moment in time and then releasing a serial, indeed it may allow for a more iterative process wrt to mix and mastering

> The existence of that medium of music doesn't make sense in the current year given how people actually go about consuming music.

I'm not convinced. The standard 3-4 minute pop song came about because that's what could fit on one side of a 78. Albums came about because an LP (33 1/2) could fit roughly 40 minutes of music, or 10-12 of those songs. These formats proved to be a popular and effective even though the technologies that created them are long obsolete.

Over 80% of my music listening is full albums, even though I haven’t played a record or CD since 2015.

I really hope the medium of the album survives, because I much prefer listening to a coherent and deliberate group of songs than any other method.

I don’t understand how an album wouldn’t survive if singles survive. An album is a collection of single songs.

> An album is a collection of single songs.

Releasing songs individually is a serial process. Releasing an album puts all of the songs published into the same context, and everyone’s first experience of all songs occur at the same time.

A band that makes a successful album produces something greater than the sum of the individual songs inside the album

I meant that there’s no technical reason a musician can’t release multiple songs at one time and call it an album, meaning as long as there is demand for an album, they should exist.

At this time, I would argue that the main reason that the album continues to exist is because it's woven into the fabric of the music industry. As long as there are Billboard album charts and Grammy's are awarded for best album, there will be albums. For many modern artists, they'd be just as happy dropping a continuous drip of singles.

a proper album is not a miscellanea of song, it's crafted on a theme or with a specific journey in mind

Price bundling for one - even without any synergistic benefits like telling a whole story over an album.

That's a bit like saying that a movie is a collection of single pictures.

An album is a playlist of songs selected by the musician. They can be consumed as a playlist, or individually.

A frame of a movie won’t make sense without the whole movie.

> A frame of a movie won’t make sense without the whole movie.

Why not? It means exactly what's in the frame and what you can derive from it alone. The movie in its entirety may have a more profound and precise meaning, sometimes entirely different from what disjointed frames will tell you, which is the point of my analogy.

Perhaps songs-scenes make a more fair analogy. Some albums are basically collections of singles because the collection itself doesn't represent any meaningful overarching theme or creative process. I feel the same about movies. I'd bore myself to death watching another Marvel movie, but I'll happily enjoy some disjointed highlights from them on youtube.

Wouldn’t say frame, but more like a collection of scenes.

I love the album format. Long live albums.

Interesting to note that the play duration of an LP was not seemingly the result of intentional design decisions around sound quality, speed, physical size, ease of manufacture, etc, but rather a bit of a historical accident arising from technology changes, and marketing missteps:

"When initially introduced, 12-inch LPs played for a maximum of about 23 minutes per side, 10-inchers for around 15... Economics and tastes initially determined which kind of music was available on each format. Recording company executives believed upscale classical music fans would be eager to hear a Beethoven symphony or a Mozart concerto without having to flip over multiple, four-minute-per-side 78s, and that pop music fans, who were used to listening to one song at a time, would find the shorter time of the 10-inch LP sufficient. As a result, the 12-inch format was reserved solely for higher-priced classical recordings and Broadway shows. Popular music continued to appear only on 10-inch records.

Their beliefs were wrong. By the mid-1950s, the 10-inch LP, like its similarly sized 78 rpm cousin, would lose the format war and be discontinued."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LP_record#Playing_time

This is sad and feels to me like a dumbing down of everything due to short attention spans.

I still prefer to listen to full coherent albums, and one of the highlights of my week is my Sunday run, which gives me time to listen to an album start to finish with no interruptions.

I hope some of my favorite musicians will continue to conceptualize albums that have a 45+ minute arc, even if market pressures mean that they'll initially need to release the tracks one at a time.

Even before streaming music, I don’t think many people listened to whole albums. I distributed a lot of custom CDs to people in high school because they wanted various singles off of different CDs and I had access to a CD burner and could rip and record them in custom mixes.

I personally find it too tedious to even work out the lyrics of the song because most of the time I can’t figure out what the singer is saying, or whatever cryptic message it is. I just listen for the sounds, mostly, and that scratches my itch sufficiently to not make it worth my while to look more into it. But I can understand if some people do have an interest in it.

There was once a time in popular music when you could actually understand the words coming out of a singer's mouth, as they weren't digitally over-processed, enhanced with autotune, and mixed into a zero-dynamic-range soup of loudness. Maybe I'm just old and out of touch, but I often can't tell the difference between modern pop song singers--many sound more like the output of a DSP than human.

I listen to whole albums. I still buy CDs primarily because I don't want piecemeal "hits" when there's gold in the material that will never see wide promotion. You'll never hear that without buying an album. Live albums in particular don't work at all in the streaming era where tracks are discrete units that can't flow into each other. When I rip a CD I know with 100% certainty the gaps will be seamless.

My impression is that there was actually some benefit to having really long streaming albums, at least if you were already a hit artist. You'd rack up more individual plays and thus more money. This only works, though, if people are coming to you and playing the album rather than being sent to a song via an algorithm. If that's the majority of your usage, a constant drip of new singles makes sense.

I absolutely agree, and that's what I think the CEO is referring to. Slowly dropping 6-12 singles over a two year period is more sensible nowadays than taking two years to write, record, and release an album or EP.

In fact, leaving out the few niche bands that release albums as a cohesive whole, the concept of an album seems terribly anachronistic in this new world of streaming. It's now the era of the single song, whether we like it or not. This is, of course, just considering popular genres of music.

How much of that falls to user experience though? We're not constrained by physical media, but aren't we by Spotify design?

I almost exclusively browse my library by album, but Spotify generally pushes me towards tracks. The release radar, for example, offers no way to filter to full album releases.

I hope artists aren't pressured into releasing tracks one off purely due to design decisions vs artistic choice. Software can easily cater to both.

I blame this on iTunes, not Spotify, when I first got into music because I didn’t want to spend all my cash on an entire album for just one or two tracks I really liked. Up until the last 5 or so years I rarely took the time to listen to a album of a song I heard on the radio or in a mix.

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