Ian Astbury believes iTunes kas killed the album. And all the people who download single tracks are proving him right. But is it too soon to say RIP to the LP?

This summer has seen the loss of many greats: the King of Pop, the king of psyche-garage-pop (Sky Saxon) and arguably the finest of British rock journalists, Steven Wells. I can surely be forgiven for failing to realise that the album died at the same time.

"Albums are dead," declared the Cult's Ian Astbury, no less, to the El Paso Times last month. "The format is dead. ITunes destroyed albums – the whole idea of the album. Nobody buys albums, it's been proven."

Astbury went on to tell journalist Doug Pullen of his admiration for Radiohead: "I find their albums highly listenable. I get lost in a body of work." But in the main, his point seemed to be that we may as well just leave the LP to draw its last breath.

The most recognisable part of Beethoven's Ninth is the Scherzo. Perhaps it doesn't suit our flighty 21st-century existence to drop out for more than an hour to listen to the full symphony. Why bother wasting time on the whole of Dark Side of the Moon when Money alone will do?

The album proper, some say, began in 1956 with Peggy Lee's Black Coffee, for which the songs were carefully chosen and ordered rather than thrown together. The Beatles' Rubber Soul and the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds marked the dawn of the golden era, and rock groups were divided by critics into "singles" and "albums" bands. The most versatile and successful acts swung both ways, but for some, only a 20-minute, vinyl-side excursion into the centre of the mind would suffice. The album was a trip, and you had to do the whole thing.

The album was dealt its first blow by Dire Straits. Forgive them, for they know not what they did. In 1985, their digitally recorded full-length release Brothers in Arms was the first to sell a million copies on CD. And, for the first time, UK album-buyers were able to easily flick their way past tracks that bored them, without having to move the stylus by hand and avoid losing the Blu-tacked coin that weighted it down. These new optical-disc consumers could also ignore the rest of Brothers in Arms, if they desired, and stick the 8.26-minute-long hit Money for Nothing on repeat ad infinitum (if you had the vinyl version, it was shortened to 7.04).

The speed with which pundits have been kissing the album goodnight has only grown since the mass adoption of the MP3 as music format of choice. Last November, the rock writer Chuck Klosterman claimed Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy would be "the last album that will be marketed as a collection of autonomous-but-connected songs, the last album that will be absorbed as a static manifestion of who the band supposedly is, and the last album that will matter more as a physical object than as an internet sound file. This is the end of that."

I'm not sure Klosterman has been proven right just yet. The recent excitement over the Mercury prize shortlist shows that an award that celebrates the album, rather than just a few tracks by an artist, continues to be relevant.

However, many reviews now recommend just a few songs to download, leaving the others – the so-called filler tracks, many of which improve with time – to languish in obscurity. Surely now is the time for a counter-revolution. Failing a neo-Luddite crusade to destroy the shuffle and track-skip capabilities of every MP3 player in the world, we must promote the virtues of the album as a whole. The single-track counter-revolution begins here: we don't just want the chocolate fancies in the window, we want the whole bloody bakery!