Are iTunes and Spotify killing the full-length music album?

In the age of music streaming, is the full-length album destined for extinction?

Clockwise from top left, Rihanna, Adele, Ellie Goulding and Ed Sheeran.

How many albums did you buy or stream, then listen to from start to finish — not just once, but repeatedly — in 2015? A couple? A handful? If your answer is “a handful”, ask yourself this: did you get those albums ­because the opportunity for immersion that an album offers is still your preferred way of experiencing music by your favourite artists? Or because an album strikes you as the most profound expression of a musician’s art? A bit of both?

Next question: might there be an element of conditioning in this preference? After all, that’s what you grew up doing, right? One more: might there — be honest here — be moments when you reappraise that lauded album by band X or singer Y, be it a recent release or a long-enshrined pop classic, and think, “Hang on, I keep skipping tracks four, seven and 10. And sometimes six as well”. (Hand on heart, how many “classic” albums — London Calling, Horses, Songs in the Key of Life, Exile on Main Street, Heroes — have you done that with?) Yet you still buy — or, increasingly, stream — albums. Why?

Launched in 1948, the vinyl LP was an innovation that by the mid-1960s had become not only a huge money-spinner for the recording industry but a shop window in which bands and solo artists could express themselves in a way that was considered much more meaningful than the stand-alone three-minute pop single. The coffers swelled to bursting point with the introduction of the compact disc in 1983, which cemented the album’s status as pop music’s ultimate artistic mark of quality and cash cow.

So these were the foundations on which the modern record industry — and many artists’ ­careers — were built and, for several decades, sustained. In each case, technology dictated art; or, rather, it created the formats — and profits — in which that art could thrive. And it was again technology that reshaped the landscape at the turn of the century, with the birth of Napster in 1999 and the growth of peer-to-peer file ­sharing/illegal downloading; then, two years later, with the launch of iTunes.

In these instances, technology, taking the lead, played a far less benign role in shaping the industry’s future; and the major labels are still coming to terms with how averse millennials, and generations X and Z, have become to the idea of paying more than loose change for music.

It is iTunes, however, that, artistically, has had the more seismic effect, allowing us to “unbundle” albums and opt for individual songs. Which we duly did, in our hundreds of millions.

Fifteen years later, we continue to do so — on iTunes, Spotify, Deezer, Google Play. As if in denial about this fundamental shift, labels and bands remain shackled to the concept of the album: a format that can cost a small fortune to market; that often stretches a band way beyond its creative limitations; that invariably makes a loss; that will very likely be cherry-picked for two or three standout songs, with the remainder of this profound, sweated-over, ruinously expensive and possibly psychologically damaging artistic statement reduced to makeweight status. So perhaps the question shouldn’t be “You still buy albums — why?”, but “You still make albums — why?”

This isn’t a case of wishing the format would die (though there are times, as an album reviewer, when I sort of wish it would). But there is an argument for saying that most albums just aren’t very good or worthwhile. You can’t cite the statistics in support, alas, not least because they measure consumption rather than satisfaction. Moreover, they paint an extremely confusing picture. Physical sales of albums declined, but slightly more slowly than in previous years. Streaming, meanwhile, grew by 82 per cent in volume in the same period. That figure includes albums as well as individual songs.

It is the blurring of the distinction between the two — the British system counts 1000 streams of an album track as an album “sale”, yet those streams also count towards the song’s placing on the singles chart — that lies at the heart of the debate about technology and art, and whether the record industry is responding to these changes as imaginatively as it could.

Adele and Ed Sheeran may sell in vast quantities — by sticking to old-as-the-hills songwriting tenets — but their sales figures flatter to deceive. For the most part, major-label albums are today geared to the streaming market: Justin Bieber’s new one, tracks from which briefly flooded the singles charts, is a prime example.

If they’re not, and/or they fail to make an impact on streaming sites, they tend to sink without trace. Pharrell Williams, despite co-writing three of the biggest singles of the century so far, couldn’t get arrested for his 2014 album Girl.

Most major-label albums are now devised as a sequence of individual songs ripe for the plucking, so you tend to end up with an uneven product that lacks cohesion — and, by extension, artistic identity and individuality. Inevitably, the results can sound like the musical equivalent of a pick ’n’ mix display — or, in the case of Rihanna’s latest album, a maze constructed from gorse bushes.

By way of illustration, I recently reviewed the new album by the Grammy-winning Hampshire singer Foxes, whose music is like an amalgam of Adele’s big-hair balladry, Florence Welch’s sledgehammer emoting and Ellie Goulding’s breathy electro-pop. It isn’t terrible (some of the songs are beautiful), but you would be hard pushed to describe it as a profound artistic statement. It’s eager to please, which strikes me as a pretty depressing conclusion to draw from an album. So why is it an album? Or, to go further: is it an album at all?

One answer is: yes, of course it is, it’s being released in that format, promoted as such and priced accordingly. But if you ignore the standard record-industry shibboleths about how to make and market pop music — and most of us do — well, no, it isn’t.

We are the curators (and the unbundles) now. As long as labels persist with the album format, then we are, to a certain extent, stuck with it, as are artists. But that doesn’t mean our consumption is tied to the format.

Kanye West and Radiohead are both about to release new albums. Some of us will buy, or stream, the whole thing. But most of us, because it’s 2016, will isolate our favourite tracks and largely ignore the rest.

The Sunday Times