not surprised by the way of the album, look what happened to real groups/ bands… a lot of music today is a parade of featured artist (depending on what you listen to) but it’s often looking like everything is just one big group of features, no real identities, just a love-fest for producers
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I wonder if there’s a better ontology. Perhaps this:
- (EP | LP) : technical formats which have mechanical consequences (like the number of vinyl discs you have to include in the package, or the available bandwidth for the audio)
- (album) : the collection of music as the experience of creating or listening to it
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„proper“ albums require much longer production cycle than modern music can afford.
singles/EPs are just optimal these days.
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fixed
I still love to listen to full albums at work, where I am forced to sit around for 8+ hours. I have the time, so why not do a deep dive? At home, I’m too busy to sit around and listen to a full album. Too much to do around the house after working all day, haha.
Spotify is just too damn convenient to use on my work computer. One browser tab with access to a ton of music. It’s not like I’m going to have access to vinyl or CD’s, or load up my work computer with 3,000 mp3’s. I feel guilty about using Spotify, but… it is what it is.
As an artist, I am thinking more and more about just making “EP’s” or whatever you want to call them, with about 4-6 songs. I get bogged down with the heavy lifting of polishing 10-12 tracks over 2-3 years. I think smaller batches of music might keep things more fresh.
In the age of major artists releasing singles only, I think I would miss the little in-between songs and B-sides that turn out to be real gems.
I do hope there will always be artists who release full albums, or at least an “EP” with more experimental songs or supporting mood-setting songs that expand the story that the main “single” has introduced.
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Everythings been in decline ever since it started. The whole universe basically.
This talk of “oh it’s all singles now, everything gone to shit etc.” is kind of funny to me. Maybe you don’t remember the 90s, the last era of the album and big record labels but mainstream music was just as single driven back then. Singles were played on MTV and radio, both of which were HUGE and IMO comparable to streaming now. Of course there were the albums being sold that doesn’t exist anymore, but I don’t think most bands or artists, at least the commercial ones necessarily put much effort into their albums. They were just a collection of singles and non-singles, often way too long and with 50% filler tracks.
I don’t even know when the golden age of music was. Was in in the 80s, when recording hardware got cheap enough for DIY bands and labels to release non-commercial music for the first time in history but the mainstream was just as if not more commercial than it is now? Was it in the 70s, when the gatekeepers had a stranglehold on music and you couldn’t get an album done without a record label A&R on your side? Was it before that, when albums weren’t even a thing and everyone was just making singles? Was it before that, when most musicians never got to make a recording and playing live was the most common way of hearing music? Or is it now, where anyone with a little bit of money and time to learn can make, at least from a technical point of view, half decent music and release it for everyone to hear?
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I was just talking as an owner of a Record Shop back in the 80’s. 
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Only the first sentence was a reply to you!
Even as an artist, modern life has shortened your attention span.
I don’t mean this as an attack, only an interesting observation. We’ve all been sped up, our attention cut short, distractions and multi-threaded lives made into the norm.
I blame capitalism…
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Yes i agree. Why stop at the end of Vinyl. Classical Music had a peak period and been in decline since.
Yet at the same time culture has slowed down. In the 70s and 80s, musical trends lasted for a few years and the next generation of listeners would had drastically different taste. The next big thing was constantly brewing and the cycle was quite short. Now, the cycle is something like 10 years, and the new trends are just old trends recycled and sold to us by the capitalist entertainment industry over and over again. We cycle the 70s, the 80s, the 90s and I guess now the noughties without any truly new and innovative reaching any significant commercial status anymore. It’s the same with movies and all pop culture, incidentally.
Late 70s / early 80s post punk & early synthesizer music was the last modernist movement in music.
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To a degree, certainly. But it’s also just getting older (late forties), with more responsibilities, less free time, and plain old being tired, haha.
Also, I think 4-6 songs made over a shorter period of time can feel more cohesive than a long album made over 2-3 years when interests, tastes, techniques, instruments/gear/software, etc. change and result in songs that might not feel as if they belong together anymore.
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The Ramones disagree.
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Why not just sign up for a different, “better” service?
I don’t think the issue is streaming, per se, but Spotify’s dominance of it: the idea of having, like, every godamn song on the planet available to play immediately is not a bad thing. But as long as Spotify dominates it and writes the rules - low pay to artists, dirty power, low quality sound, narrowly focused on pushing the top (lowest common denominator) hits etc - we’ll be losing as the audience / consumer. Just like what Google and Facebook did to the internet. Choose your service wisely, Bandcamp forever (how I wish they’d start a streaming service) and don’t rely on the big boys to recommend you music.
And I don’t know what people are talking about claiming music is no good these days: I am loving a lot of stuff that’s coming out.
When the hell was Pfork not hipster? I think they’re less hipster these days than ever before (will actually consider music made by people who are not white dudes).
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Well they did start before hipsters such as we’re using the word really existed. Or were all indie rock & independent left field music listeners always hipsters? I stopped reading when half or more of their reviews were conteporary pop and rap, which would be around 2005 maybe?
They’ve always had an insufferable pretentious style, which they’ve toned down significantly since the late 90s or early aughts. I mean go read their Kid A review, jesus christ it’s horrible.
" The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax."
Pfork probably loves the idea of them being hipster before there was hipster.
Yes, in the beginning they all considered themselves the new Lester Bangs and wrote reviews that were almost always either overwrought or overhyped, sometimes sexist or racist, and often times a mixture of them all.
You have to give them credit, though: they broke a lot of important music to their sizeable audience.
While I like that the new Conde Nast Pfork is far more inclusive, I don’t see them going as far out into left field.
Bandcamp artists need a Pfork.
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For sure, I did discover many bands thru them. More thru the Aquarius newsletter, though.
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A mailing list-style communiqué with blurbs for the cognoscenti would be quite interesting to try in the age of playlists. Oftentimes it could be more rewarding to merely present a review/explanation and then letting people seek out that music intentionally.
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