By: Michael J. McIntyre
The album, as we have known it for decades, is now a relic of the past.
Since its popularization in the 1960s, the album has been the standard vehicle for commercial music composition.[1] Ushered in by the creation of physical “long-playing” vinyl records, the album rapidly exploded in popularity, furthered propelled by top bands at the time such as The Beach Boys.[2] The album was introduced as a commercial product, structured by the physical limitations of the vinyl record onto which it was etched. However, beyond its physical reality, the idea of the album took on an artistic identity of its own.
The album represented a shift of commercial music toward cohesive musical ideas developed across multiple songs on a single record.[3] It presented an artistic product greater than the sum of its parts; each song came together to form a cohesive narrative and musical arc that could not be achieved by singles alone. This concept extended as technology evolved, with the format transferring to CDs in later decades.[4]
That is, until the advent of streaming.
Streaming fundamentally shifted the concept of the album from two angles: listener experience and artistic motivation.
Streaming has changed the entire experience of listening to music and, arguably, made the album obsolete. Rather than existing as a physical product, music consumption became digitized. This allows consumers to access a wider variety of music with greater ease than ever before.
With streaming, listeners can create playlists, selecting individual songs by artists and compiling them as they please. Even within a single artist’s catalog, streaming platforms commonly create “Essentials” playlists, selecting the most popular songs by a particular artist and arranging them in a different order than they appear on albums.[5]
Streaming has also altered artists’ motivations in creating content, making the album more of a compilation of singles than a cohesive product. Popular music today, as it has been for decades, is fundamentally a commercial enterprise. Artists often tailor their music and format to match consumer preferences. As consumer listening norms change, commercial motivations shift with them.
As described above, streaming has shifted the way listeners interact with music, prioritizing individual playlists and track-skipping over sustained listening.[6] Accordingly, commercial music is now optimized to generate individual hits rather than a long-form cohesive product.[7] There is far less incentive to create narrative and musical arcs within an album, as many listeners will not hear the entire album from front to back.[8]
The historical approach to albums as cohesive musical works underscored the creation of several of the greatest albums of all time: Thriller, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Songs in the Key of Life, to name a few.[9]
These works, unlike more disjointed modern albums, exist as unified compositions with distinct peaks and valleys, ebbing and flowing across the entire project through various tracks. Some albums maximize this concept, blending tracks together to create an uninterrupted listening experience, such as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.
Beyond musical quality, historically acclaimed albums often possess a coherent theme or narrative, such as Marvin Gaye’s socially charged What’s Going On or Fleetwood Mac’s drama-filled Rumours.[10]
What is lost to the consumer in this revolution within the music industry? Without these elements, many albums today lose their distinctive qualities and are limited in their artistic depth. Albums no longer rely upon unified themes and musical continuity in the way they once did, and pre-released “singles” become the defining pieces of a project.
Consider it this way: TV dramas are comprised of episodes organized into seasons. Each episode has its own plot, with rising action, climax, and falling action; yet, each episode (ideally) connects to form a larger narrative arc across the entire season or series. This interrelation makes each individual episode more compelling and makes the show as a whole worth watching. If someone were to watch a single episode of Breaking Bad in the middle of Season Two and nothing else, their appreciation of that episode would be inherently incomplete.
Similarly, individual songs on an album, at their best, work together like episodes in a season. Each song has its own rising action and climax, but these gain greater value within the broader artistic arc of the album as a whole.
Without the album functioning as an integrated artistic work, songs become stand-alone pieces compiled together, robbing the listener of the slow burn made possible through extended composition. It would be absurd for Netflix to release a “shuffle” feature for experiencing a new season of Stranger Things; so why should albums be held to a different standard?
Certainly, some artists defy this trend and create albums that honor the historic qualities of the format (see Beyoncé’s Lemonade or Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, for example). These projects demonstrate that the album format is still possible, but they are increasingly the exception rather than the rule.
As in most commercial industries, results in music follow incentives. In today’s streaming-centered market, artists are incentivized to view albums as compilations of potential hits, with each song serving as a stand-alone opportunity to top the charts.
Artists may continue to call their latest releases “albums,” but the form no longer carries the structural weight it once did. Streaming has reshaped not just how we listen, but how music is created. For all of streaming’s convenience and democratization, one thing is certain: the album as a cohesive artistic statement has been fundamentally diminished, and streaming is to blame.[11]
[1] Jason Kennedy, The history of the LP, Hi-Fi Plus (Dec. 20, 2023) https://hifiplus.com/ [https://perma.cc/B7YA-CQAR].
[2] Id.
[3] Joseph Smith, The History of Music: Evolution of Album Formats, Dig In Records (June 20, 2025), https://diginrecords.com/ [https://perma.cc/4V6U-UN6U].
[4] Id.
[5] See This is Laufey, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/ [https://perma.cc/Z6CR-2ZEA].
[6] See Nicola Montecchio, Pierre Roy & François Pachet, The skipping behavior of users of music streaming services and its relation to musical structure, NLM (Sep. 30, 2020),https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ [https://perma.cc/5RKR-KHBA].
[7] See Ari Morris, The State of Pop Music Today: Why Many Artists Don’t Make Albums Anymore, Spare Rib (Oct. 4, 2022), https://www.spareribdartmouth.com/ [https://perma.cc/5V4J-C2HZ].
[8] Id.
[9] The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, Rolling Stone (Dec. 31, 2023), https://www.rollingstone.com/ [https://perma.cc/L3J9-7WQT].
[10] See id.
[11] See Laura Erickson, The music album is dead and streaming platforms have killed it, The Gonzaga Bulletin (Apr. 17, 2025), https://www.gonzagabulletin.com/ [https://perma.cc/B5RC-E5PX].
