In November 2021 Spotify removed the shuffle button from all album pages across the whole of Spotify. As was widely reported at the time this was in response to a request from Adele that “our stories should be listened to as we intended”. It’s pretty remarkable that a platform as all powerful as Spotify would be so responsive to such a request (even if it did come from Adele) but while it’s easy to like this idea, considering most music can be accessed without having to buy a whole album, why in 2022 would someone listen to the whole thing?

So do we listen to albums anymore? Of course if you buy an album you’ll value it far more than if it is one of millions which are available as part of your streaming subscription. Anyone who has ever bought an album based on the couple of great tracks you know, only to find a bunch of filler around them will understand the buyer’s remorse involved, but there are also those hidden gem album tracks which wouldn’t ever get elevated to a Single but are ultimately more rewarding. When we had to invest in physical albums didn’t we persist with music which didn’t have “first listen appeal”?

Track Skipping

In spite of having access to so much music via streaming platforms, I know I listen to far less than I used to years ago. And when I do, I tend to skip from track to track far more than I ever did in the analogue days. When listening to vinyl or cassettes the mechanics of skipping tracks were limited. Finding the start of the next track on a cassette could take as long as listening to the track you were skipping, if you had a fancy cassette player you might have a semi-reliable search function which found the gap automatically (sometimes…) or the determined amongst us would half-press Play while in FF to hear the high speed warbles of the track speeding past. On balance it was easier just to let it play through the track you didn’t want.

Similarly, while skipping tracks on vinyl is easy enough (in good enough light) we all knew it was bad for the record and wasn’t something you would do to someone else’s vinyl, well not among my friends! The thing is that it was disruptive and, particularly if listening to an album in company, it wasn’t really encouraged. CDs were of course different but in the mid 80s chances were the only CD you had was Brothers In Arms…

But listening to an album isn’t something you do because it’s too much hassle to skip the filler, or shouldn’t be. There is something most of us recognise about the completeness, the journey of listening to a great album. Some albums literally tell a story, though these are relatively few and far between. Dipping in and out of Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds would be odd, at least on the first listen, but the ‘concept albums’ so beloved by Prog Rockers probably stand apart from this debate, though few can agree on exactly what is and isn’t a concept album, seeing as how this was often a status ascribed to albums by fans rather than the artists.

What’s So Special About An Album Anyway?

With online distribution, the necessity to punctuate a recording career with album releases is gone. But it’s still a model which is more or less followed in the industry. A period of intense songwriting and production resulting in an extended body of work is healthy and we all understand the value of a target and maybe even a deadline. To a greater or lesser extent the artist might have a vision for the sequencing of the album and the emotional arc of the entire experience. These playing orders can be significant. I know that when I hear the last notes of some songs I know really well, if I don’t hear the opening notes of the next track on the album it comes from it jars me. In fact I remember my 17 year old self getting unjustifiably annoyed with a girl who brought a compilation tape (remember those? - that’s another article right there) into my college common room and she’d taken Wish You Were Here out of its context on the album (gasps). My 17 year old self did lack perspective sometimes but do you get my point?

The sequencing of an album is something which is taken seriously, and with the adoption of proper, album-based loudness normalisation as discussed in our recent podcast Loudness For Streaming Services - Discussed with Bob Katz and Rob Byers, the intention of the mastering engineer in dynamically placing individual tracks in an album context is preserved but the reasons different tracks were placed at different points in the running order used to be technical as well as artistic. When cutting vinyl, where you could most effectively place loud material was dictated by the medium, and the sound quality changed across the side of the record. It’s not like that now but the conventions of the Album form developed as a combination of the aesthetic and the practical. Nowhere more obviously than in the length of an album. Some old albums are really short. I have a copy of Nashville Skyline. It’s 27 minutes long!

What About The Strength Of Vinyls Sales?

In these days of streaming it would be easy to pronounce the album dead, or at least expiring if it weren’t for reports like this one from the Guardian which reports 2021 as the 14th year of concurrent growth of vinyl album sales with 8% growth in 2021 and over 5 million albums sold in the UK. When considering why this is, the same factors are referenced - the reduced temptation to skip tracks and the ritual of putting an album on a deck, but it’s not without troubling aspects. Leaving the confident but questionable claims that “vinyl sounds better” than digital, the type of records being sold is interesting. A running joke among vinyl dealers is that they can’t get enough copies of Rumors to satisfy demand. Shifting lorryloads of Fleetwood Mac and Pink Floyd doesn’t benefit today’s industry.

But ‘Album’ doesn’t equal ‘vinyl’. Once we have overcome the option-paralysis of the infinite choice presented by Spotify etc. how many of us listen to a whole album start to finish any more? Not some or most of an album but the whole thing? I was inspired to ask this question after taking a walk yesterday and making the conscious decision to listen to the whole of an album I’ve never listened to in its entirety. After a bit of thought it occurred to me that I’ve never listened to Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside in a single listen. I knew probably 80% of it but there were at least a couple of tracks I’d never heard before and the context in which the big songs appear is interesting. Choose an album you’re not sure you’ve heard start to finish before and do the same. And don’t skip any tracks.

So, is Adele right?