

Ask HN: Albums or songs? - noaharc

My uncle has always chided me for consuming music primarily on a per-song basis.  He believes the album is a larger, more complex, and more satisfying artistic work, and assured me that as I got older I'd gravitate toward albums.<p>I am not so sure.  I think the album is chiefly a marketing invention.  It originated as a way to let record labels charge more than they did for a single, even though marginal value of the "filler" songs was relatively low -- both in terms of cost to the artist, and in terms of enjoyment to the listener.<p>Do you usually listen to full albums?  What do you think is the fundamental unit of creative musical expression?
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silentbicycle
Some albums are very deliberately structured to have a narrative, or otherwise
stand as a whole, while some really are just a collection of individual songs.
It depends more on the particular album than anything, though.

Also, there are other factors affecting the album format besides just the
musicians' intent. I remember John Darnielle (of the Mountain Goats)
mentioning during a show that in the UK, a single with more than three songs
on it doesn't count toward single sales in the charts, so there are often
several versions the same single with different B-sides rather than one EP
with a few more songs. (Or something like that. Then again, he also said it
was probably in the Magna Carta.)

FWIW, I tend to listen to albums, but in many cases it's just because I get
attached to the sequence of songs.

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kleevr
When I'm (attempting) a critical listening of music. I prefer to explore it in
it's larger context (typically as an album). Some 'albums', definitely not all
CDs, have a greater architecture than any one song can completely embody, and
thus the work is more meaningful in the larger context. (Think conceptual
albums, etc.)

But I would definitely consider my casual day-to-day listening as song based.

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Tangurena
I usually purchase CDs.

I've had hard drives fail. I've had removable (and USB) hard drives stolen.
I've lost user accounts to online stores (when they tied them to email
addresses I haven't used in years) so I can't reauthorize or redownload what I
already paid for. When I lived in South Florida, I found that CD-Rs basically
erased themselves in the heat/humidity down there (so a CD-R was good for
maybe 1 year before it became unreadable).

