Ask HN: Albums or songs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Albums or songs?

3 pointsnoaharc3 comments

My uncle has always chided me for consuming music primarily on a per-song basis. He believes the album is a larger, more complex, and more satisfying artistic work, and assured me that as I got older I'd gravitate toward albums.

I am not so sure. I think the album is chiefly a marketing invention. It originated as a way to let record labels charge more than they did for a single, even though marginal value of the "filler" songs was relatively low -- both in terms of cost to the artist, and in terms of enjoyment to the listener.

Do you usually listen to full albums? What do you think is the fundamental unit of creative musical expression?

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Some albums are very deliberately structured to have a narrative, or otherwise stand as a whole, while some really are just a collection of individual songs. It depends more on the particular album than anything, though.

Also, there are other factors affecting the album format besides just the musicians' intent. I remember John Darnielle (of the Mountain Goats) mentioning during a show that in the UK, a single with more than three songs on it doesn't count toward single sales in the charts, so there are often several versions the same single with different B-sides rather than one EP with a few more songs. (Or something like that. Then again, he also said it was probably in the Magna Carta.)

FWIW, I tend to listen to albums, but in many cases it's just because I get attached to the sequence of songs.

When I'm (attempting) a critical listening of music. I prefer to explore it in it's larger context (typically as an album). Some 'albums', definitely not all CDs, have a greater architecture than any one song can completely embody, and thus the work is more meaningful in the larger context. (Think conceptual albums, etc.)

But I would definitely consider my casual day-to-day listening as song based.

I usually purchase CDs.

I've had hard drives fail. I've had removable (and USB) hard drives stolen. I've lost user accounts to online stores (when they tied them to email addresses I haven't used in years) so I can't reauthorize or redownload what I already paid for. When I lived in South Florida, I found that CD-Rs basically erased themselves in the heat/humidity down there (so a CD-R was good for maybe 1 year before it became unreadable).

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