The Decline of the Album

            Although the album as a cohesive form of art has been in decline since before the widespread adoption and use of compact discs in the mid-1990s, the explosion of new and portable technologies in the 21st century and the consequent digitization of transmissible media has all but wiped it out entirely. A pervasive sense that something crucial has been lost is easy to identify among music critics and listeners alike, but I have yet to encounter a satisfactory account which articulates the exact nature of this ostensible loss. Some argue that digital formats have degraded audio quality. Such contentions about the superiority of older storage media (i.e. vinyl records and magnetic tape) are often cited with vague, half-understood concepts like file compression or poorly bolstered by nebulous, unqualifiable adjectives like “warm.” Nevertheless, digital recordings are variously and measurably advantageous alternatives to their analog counterparts, being possessed of a greater capacity for dynamic range, lower noise floors, and quantifiably higher audio fidelity. Others have argued that digital music’s total lack of a tangible component somehow cheapens or diminishes it. Having accumulated a considerable amount of physical media over the last ten years or so, however, I cannot help but see the erasure of the need to unobtrusively house records and CDs as an improvement. The experience of anything that might be contained in a gatefold can be, I think, easily and profitably ported to a screen without any substantial risk of dilution.  The argument that seems to come nearest to the truth asserts that our relatively new ability to manipulate and rearrange the content of an album, through features like pausing and track-skipping, alters our experience of a record in a way that undermines, even destroys it as a musically and aesthetically coherent totality. Perhaps as a culture we have developed a kind of modern sensibility that evokes an appreciation for or affiliation with fragmentation, incoherence, and noise, but we rarely exercise our ability to reorder and fracture works of art in other mediums; I have never read the chapters of a novel erratically or cut a painting apart to regard the pieces in isolation. Thus far, however, this line of argument has only gestured toward identifying the issue—what precisely it is that has been lost, forgotten, or obscured in the transition of music, technologies, and our interactions with them into the digital age.

            The central problem which has arisen a result of our dissection and deconstruction of albums as formerly whole pieces of art, it seems to me, is namely one of missing context. Many of us have relinquished our roles as curators of music to software, preferring to consume music more passively, as sorted through the filter of programs like iTunes, Pandora, and Spotify. The kind of listening experiences software algorithms facilitate often create an odd mélange of time period and musical style, juxtaposed pieces with little or no compositional relation to one another, a jumble of tracks robbed of their positional context—the unique ways in which they are situated among similar compositions on an album or larger musical work. One’s reception of pieces of music thus intermixed is necessarily altered by the process. I don’t contend that such a transformation is categorically destructive, but that what one loses in the alteration is significant and worthy of recognition, perhaps even preservation. Of course, these new modes of listening born of our changing technologies create experiences which were, without a veritable arsenal of machines, formerly impossible. The algorithmic synthesis of disparate pieces of music can generate new and newly meaningful context for tracks in a given playlist; this, too, is exciting and deeply valuable. Nevertheless, in the radical dismemberment of albums which takes place with some measure of ubiquity in digital environments, we seem to be in the process of losing a musical tradition older than the symphony. Because we can now fragment and minutely control the circumstances in which we consume music as much as we can manipulate the music itself, we disconnect ourselves from critical nuances of composition and arrangement, the small and often masterfully executed ways in which pieces of a work of art inform and alter the whole—the introduction and return of themes, the progression of larger pieces or collections of movements toward a climax and denouement, the fine threads of the webbing of musical and lyrical structure which create cohesion and dissonance. If we appreciate the pieces of an album individually, we necessarily appreciate and hear them differently.

            In the end, the digitization of music and our experiences of and with it does not seem to me to be the harbinger of collapse or of some great devaluation of music or of the album as an art. To begin with, the album was largely a product of early recording technologies and their inherent limitations. The album is so bound to the machines which precipitated its existence that we should hardly expect it to remain formally static in the technologically protean landscape of the 21st century. To cling to what the album has been for the sake of our cultural conservatism would be equally absurd. Speaking more macroscopically on my personal sentiments about our changing relationship with the album and what seems to me its consequent disappearance, change inevitably and perturbingly involves loss and introduction; this often seems like a kind of exchange in which value is immeasurable, opaque, or indistinguishable. So, in the exercise of articulating my thoughts, I have articulated much less than I hoped, and perhaps this kind of clouded transaction is to blame. Perhaps that’s an overly abstracted cop-out for my own expressive or analytical inadequacies. Ultimately, I am not sure precisely what we have traded in our transition to digital media, despite a real sense of bereavement or sadness or maybe curmudgeonliness which pervades my reflections. Though I am genuinely exhilarated by the expanding horizons of musical composition and production, the decline of the album is one that I cannot help but grieve, man out of time that I am.