The album format is completely outdated. Why is music still released this way?

The album format is completely outdated. Why is music still released this way?

As opposed to what

Soundcloud singles like every patrician artist.

KILL

With digital distribution there is literally no reason to release songs in an "album". There is no play time limitation to the medium and no marginal cost for additional copies. The entire economic and utilitarian justification for albums died with digital distribution.

Kanye already introduced us the new format. Digital albums that can be patched.

Remasters have been a thing for a while.

digital

This is a thread for adults, thanks

I like to get the news.

>yfw the vast majority of albums are now recorded and mastered digitally

Probably the best physical format desu. Now that portability is no longer an issue due to digital music, it kinda outclasses cds and cassettes. Vinyl looks cool and it makes the act of playing the album a lot more satisfying.

Not to mention that records are likely to last far longer that anything else. I have records made in the 1950's that still sound and play great. I seriously doubt that any cd is going survive seventy years without suffering disc rot.

nostalgia, "warm sound" (which is actually defective sound)

Dumb poptimist

whether music should still be released this way is not a question i can definitively answer but the wealth of music out there that only exists on vinyl is a strong incentive to still support and buy analogue music equipment

some of us still have an attention span that lasts longer than 5 seconds

don't blame technology, fool

You want to tell a story... The album format is a good way of doing that. Imagine having a book without chapters.

With digital distribution you can tell a story or as many stories as you want. A better analogy would be if books were only printed with 200 pages, so every author just wrote something to fill exactly 200 pages.

Also, the number of concept albums is exceedingly small. For the vast majority of mainstream popular music there is no reason whatsoever to cluster 10-15 utterly unrelated songs together in an album except a deprecated format limitation. It's silly.

People who don't understand or appreciate the album format are always normies.

collectively we've grown used to it
old habits die hard and that

If artists released a song every time they finished one they could end up dropping one pile of shit on an another every few weeks.

Creating an album gives them time to fully consider what's worth releasing. Being in a working mood for months instead of days also forces them to focus and expand ideas instead of wrapping a neat little bow on a track and letting that be the end of it.

I believe it has to do with the album as an art form as opposed to being a collection of would-be singles. Going back before the 60's LP albums were a thing but nobody took the format seriously. Consumers were more focused on singles. It wasn't until the 60's with the surfacing of the 'concept album' that the format itself was given legitimacy to the greater public.

For myself, I prefer listening to music by album because there is a consistency in the atmosphere and a window into the mental situation of the creator that I like to think about. Also, the order in which songs are placed on an album can make a big difference for me.

How would one listen to multiple singles in a row? On an...album! An album you dumbass.

>This shitposter doesn't listen to entire albums when he listens to music.

That's like watching a single scene of a movie, ie retarded as fuck

this

i cant believe there are contrarians arguing the album format

its literally unreal how stupid this board can be sometimes

So, what would you rather have? You want things to be likes the 50s/60s where singles are the main focus of everything? Albums tie together concise ideas and have a nice flow to them. I think moving away from albums is a terrible idea. If anything people need to move back to the 40 minute album since so many releases now are extremely bloated.

I'd say for the nostalgia vibes? Even if it's for recent albums, there is some people that loved the vinyls when it was the trend at the time and still got the love for this format. Yeah, the sound is not that great compared to other systems of today, but let's be honest, it's somehow the same thing for the old games. We play/use them for the nostalgia vibes, to remind a fragment of our past.

Because it's better that way