This is one question I’ve thought about for the past couple months as I’ve been immersed more heavily in the music scene. What I mean by saying the days of the album are over is that people appear to be buying full albums less and less, while turning to streaming services in crazy amounts. Actually, according to an article by Reuter’s, streaming surpassed digital music sales for the first time in history during 2016. So is it economically responsible to release an album that flows continuously, rather than an album that contains a bunch of songs? That may make no sense but I’ll try to explain it a bit better.

Of course, artists will create whatever they choose to. It’s not up to us to dictate how an artist expresses themselves; if they want to make a 2 hour, double-album then more power to them. What I’ve been curious about rather is if streaming has made it so people are more fixed on getting an album where every song is a single-worthy song. It’s become a trend in hip-hop/electronic music to just release singles rather than full albums as well. The logic is that releasing 10 singles periodically throughout the year is better than dropping one album once a year. This actually makes sense to me, mainly due to the fact that really sitting down and listening to albums can be a bit laborious.

So are we not going to get powerhouse albums like “Dark Side Of The Moon” by Pink Floyd, or “De-Loused In The Comatorium” by The Mars Volta? Of course not. People will ultimately create what speaks to them, or what will put money in their pockets. I vote for the first because you can clearly tell when an artist is doing things for merely a paycheck or out of artistic pursuit.

First-week album sales play a big part into why streaming/the era of the single is becoming much more of a real thing than it previously was. Instead of buying a whole entire album, we’re album to buy our favorite songs of an album. So if you’re an artist trying to create songs that flow from one to another, that can create a problem. One album I can think of recently that still did very well despite this trend is Brand New’s latest release “Science Fiction”. While it contains some great single-worthy songs, I still think it’s a great album to put on and listen to in its entirety. And for it to beat out others on the top 200 was crazy just by itself.

Along with that we also have bands like Being As An Ocean releasing a 14-song album where half of the songs are interludes essentially. This is a very brave, and risky, move for a newly independent band because so much is determined by first-week album sales these days. That being said, I love the direction they took this album. Will it do financially more successful than other albums like Neck Deep’s “The Peace & The Panic”? Probably not, but if it’s what speaks to them, then who are we to say what they should be releasing.

And this isn’t to say you can’t make a great album of single-worthy material, but ultimately it has to be what you want to do. Don’t make 14 song album that flows from beginning to end if you want to release 10 songs that can be listened to independently. The only issue with streaming currently is that it is overwhelmingly underpaying its artists. In a report on Digital Music News, which includes a spreadsheet of a particular artists streaming breakdown, a single stream only gets an artist $0.004891. If the person had bought the album instead, that’d be a dollar per single. Streaming is still great though because it does pay an artist continuously. But what we need to address is how much artists are getting from these services. Because as it stands now, it’s pretty damn embarrassing if you’re making a career of it independently.

This is just my opinion but I hope you all enjoyed my outlook on this and hopefully it gets you thinking of how we need to support our favorite artists directly. Go to shows, buy merch; those two ways are how bands make most, if not all, of their money these days.