A petition for our dying friend, the album
MANILA, Philippines - Between Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram, there is a constant need for quick, small, and entertaining content. It’s an overstimulation of the senses, and it’s coming in at a hundred miles per hour. It isn’t much of a stretch to see how people have extended this fast food mentality to the consumption and curation of music.
Singles are now the preferred currency of music. In 2014, music streaming rose by 56 percent, roughly totaling a whopping 164 billion song plays. Interestingly enough, this accounts for an album sale equivalent of 56.1 million units: slightly higher than the deficit that album sales are currently going through. The numbers are clear. Singles have now become the dominant form of consuming music. Albums, not so much.
A comparison of 1994 and 2014 album sales shows that the number one album of ’94 sold almost a million more copies than last year’s number one seller. Even worse, ‘94’s number two spot almost quadrupled 2014’s number two spot, and it just gets sadder and sadder from there.
Those numbers don’t come without reasons. Singles are, in their own right, a thing of beauty. Some singles have changed the face of music as we know it, ushering in some of the most influential bands of their decade. Led Zeppelin’s first single Good Times Bad Times shook the airwaves with its rough and tumble blues riffs and heralded the band’s debut album (though it was hardly a Billboard “hit,” reaching No. 80). In some cases, the success of singles just defies logic entirely, as seen in the questionable success of the Crazy Frog song.
The power of the right single at the right time is undeniable. Through the decades, however, the status of singles in popular culture has changed. With the advent of online purchasing, streaming, social media, and the consequent halving of our collective attention spans, things changed forever for the single. It’s a buyer’s market, and buyers want smaller, faster, and catchier. At times it seems like a meat market for music as singles are tossed around without the meaning — the context — afforded them by their surrounding albums.
As good as singles are, and as much as we love our playlists, there is still an irreplaceable beauty to the album format. The album as an artistic object is something that is forgotten in the blur of singles. Singles are only one piece of the value meal and unless you really like fries and starvation, nothing but the complete package should do. A single taken out of context is like a phrase lifted from a sentence. It’s in the programming of a complete album that songs actually make a collective statement. “Story” albums and crazy concept albums are stark examples of this.
Albums like “The Antler’s Hospice,” which plays out an ill-fated love affair in a hospice, delivers devastating punches to the soul like no single ever could. Meta commentary on the fame of a ‘70s rock star — as David Bowie did on “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” — could never take shape in the span of a single. DIY album kits with different tracks on three separate albums to be played simultaneously in different combinations like The Flaming Lip’s “Zaireeka” albums are physically impossible to cram into a single tune. A hell of a lot can go in to an album even without the context of the band.
Albums reveal the actual stages that an artist goes through. Those who have heard The Arctic Monkeys’ “Whatever They Say I Am That’s What I’m Not” next to their latest album “AM” know exactly what this means. The ‘80s U2 might not have even shared the same dressing room as flashy arena rock 2015 U2. The “King of Limbs” Radiohead might have actually freaked out “Pablo Honey” Radiohead, because God knows they already freak out normal people. Going through albums of an artist’s discography is almost like looking through people’s baby pictures throughout the years. This is what gets left out in the market of singles. Missing out on these artists’ concepts and changes in the form they were meant to be experienced. Without the album, we lose touch of the artistry behind the music. Music has to be reaffirmed as an art, not a commodity.
The sheer amount of music available nowadays has people reeling. It is easy to make an argument for the necessity of singles over albums. It gets you more bang for your buck, honestly. But given the irreplaceable value of an album, it is much more respectful to argue the opposite and take your time with each record. After all, we listen to music to relax and connect with something. We don’t just consume music like Pez on Halloween.
So do yourself a favor. Tune in, step away from that “shuffle” button and just let that album breathe. Let it show you what it’s about. You owe yourself and the album that much.
