Album era

An LP record on a phonograph

Technological developments in the early 20th century led to sweeping changes in the way recorded music was made and sold. Prior to the LP, the standard medium for recorded music had been the 78 rpm gramophone record, made from shellac and featuring a three-to-five minute capacity per side.[3] The capacity limitations placed constraints on the composing processes of recording artists, while the fragility of shellac prompted the packaging of these records in empty booklets resembling photo albums,[3] with typically brown-colored wrapping paper as covers.[4] The introduction of polyvinyl chloride in record production led to vinyl records, which played with less noise and more durability.[3]

In the 1940s, the market for commercial- and home-use recordings was dominated by the competing RCA Victor and Columbia Records, whose chief engineer Peter Carl Goldmark pioneered the development of the 12-inch long play (LP) vinyl record.[3] This format could hold recordings as long as 52 minutes, or 26 minutes per side,[5] at a speed of 33 1⁄3 rpm, and was playable with a small-tipped "microgroove" stylus designed for home playback systems.[3] Officially introduced in 1948 by Columbia, LPs became known as "record albums", termed in reference to the photo album-like 78 packaging.[3] Another innovation from Columbia was the addition of graphic and typographic design to album jacket covers, introduced by Alex Steinweiss, the label's art director. Encouraged by its positive effect on LP sales, the music industry adopted illustrated album covers as a standard by the 1950s.[4]

Originally, the album was primarily marketed for classical music listeners.[6] Musical film soundtracks, jazz works, and thematic albums by singers such as Frank Sinatra quickly utilized the new longer format.[7] However, in the 1950s and into the 1960s, 45 rpm seven-inch single sales were considered the primary market for the music industry, while albums were a secondary market. The careers of notable rock and roll performers such as Elvis Presley were driven primarily by single sales.[6]

According to music critic Ann Powers, the arrival of the Beatles in the United States in 1964 "set in motion what can be called the 'classic album era'".[8] In his Concise Dictionary of Popular Culture, Marcel Danesi comments that "the album became a key aspect of the countercultural movement of the 1960s, with its musical, aesthetic, and political themes. From this, the 'concept album' emerged, with the era being called the 'album era'". He lists the Beatles' Rubber Soul (1965) as one of the first of the era's "concept albums".[9] Music historian Bill Martin cites the release of Rubber Soul in December 1965 as the "turning point" for pop music, in that for the first time "the album rather than the song became the basic unit of artistic production."[10] Author David Howard agrees, saying that "pop's stakes had been raised into the stratosphere" by Rubber Soul and "Suddenly, it was more about making a great album without filler than a great single."[11] In January 1966, Billboard magazine referred to the opening sales of Rubber Soul in the US (1.2 million copies over nine days) as proof of teenage record-buyers gravitating towards the LP format.[12] While it was in keeping with the industry norm in the UK, the lack of a hit single on Rubber Soul added to the album's identity in the US as a self-contained artistic statement.[13][14]

The Beatles in 1964; several of their 1960s studio albums have been credited by music historians for heralding the album era.

Following the Beatles' example, several rock albums intended as artistic statements were released in 1966, including the Rolling Stones' Aftermath, the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, the Beatles' own Revolver, and the Who's A Quick One.[15] Music journalist Mat Snow cites these five releases, together with Otis Redding's 1965 LP Otis Blue, as evidence that "the album era was here, and though hit singles still mattered, they were no longer pop's most important money spinners and artistic statements."[16] According to Jon Pareles, the music industry profited immensely and redefined its economic identity because of the era's rock musicians, who "started to see themselves as something more than suppliers of ephemeral hit singles".[17] In the case of the British music industry, the commercial success of Rubber Soul and Aftermath foiled attempts to re-establish the LP market as the domain of wealthier, adult record-buyers. From early 1966, record companies there ceased their policy of promoting adult-oriented entertainers over rock acts, and embraced budget albums for their lower-selling artists to cater to the increased demand for LPs.[15]

The Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is identified by Rolling Stone assistant editor Andy Greene as marking "the beginning of the album era",[18] a reference echoed by Scott Plagenhoef of Pitchfork;[19] Greene adds that "it was the big bang of albums".[18] Chuck Eddy refers to the "high album era" as beginning with Sgt. Pepper.[20] Its release in May 1967 coincided with the emergence of dedicated rock criticism in the US and intellectuals seeking to position pop albums as valid cultural works.[21] Music historian Simon Philo writes that, aside from the level of critical acclaim it received, "the record's [commercial] success ushered in the era of album-oriented rock, radically reshaping how pop music worked economically."[22] Reinforcing its creative ambition, Sgt. Pepper was packaged in a gatefold sleeve with a lyric sheet, typifying a trend whereby musicians now commissioned associates from the art world to design their LP sleeves, and presented their albums to the record company for release.[14] Greg Kot said Sgt. Pepper introduced a template for both producing album-oriented rock and consuming it, "with listeners no longer twisting the night away to an assortment of three-minute singles, but losing themselves in a succession of 20-minute album sides, taking a journey led by the artist."[23]

In addition to Sgt. Pepper, Danesi cites the Beatles' 1968 White Album as part of the era's emergence.[9] Dave Marsh has called Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" (1967) the "debut single of the Album Rock Era".[24] Neil Strauss refers to the "album-rock era" as beginning in the late 1960s and ultimately encompassing LP records by both rock and non-rock artists.[25]

The period from the mid 1960s to the late 1970s was the era of the LP and the "golden era" of the album. According to BBC Four's When Albums Ruled the World (2013), "These were the years when the music industry exploded to become bigger than Hollywood."[27] "The album era had ushered in the notion of the rock singer as an artist who is worth paying attention to for more than the length of a hit", Pareles later observed. "Performers could become vivid presences to their fans even when they weren't ubiquitous on the Top 40, and loyalties were formed that continue[d] to the [1990s] for some performers of the 1960s and 1970s, from the Kinks to Michael Jackson to Sting."[28]

Progressive rock and progressive soul musicians utilized highly conceptual album-oriented approaches in the 1970s.[29] Under Berry Gordy's leadership at Motown, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder were given creative control to approach their albums more seriously in what had generally been a single-focused soul genre, leading to a series of innovative LPs from the two as the decade ensued.[30] Gaye and Wonder were the few exceptions in what Marc Hogan of Pitchfork observes would become a predominantly white-male "rock-stuffed canon" during the album era, one that largely excluded works by female and African-American musicians.[31] According to Eric Olsen, Pink Floyd was "the most eccentric and experimental multi-platinum band of the album rock era", while Bob Marley was "the only towering figure of the rock era not from America or the U.K."[32] The 1970 Joni Mitchell LP Ladies of the Canyon is commonly regarded as one of the album era's most important records.[33] The productions of Bob Ezrin – who worked on 1970s albums by Alice Cooper and Kiss' Destroyer (1976) – are also highlighted from this era. As music journalist James Campion writes, "The 1970s album era was perfectly suited to his cinematic approach. Its format, with its two sides, as if two acts in a play with an intermission, allows for a crucial arc in the storytelling."[34] Along with the LP record, the 8-track tape was another format popular in the US in this period.[27]

Stevie Wonder (1973), an innovative artist of the era[31]

Elaborating on the 1970s LP aesthetic, Campion identifies cultural and environmental factors that, in his mind, made the format ideal for young people during the decade. He describes the "solitary ambience" offered to listeners by the turntable and headphones, which "enveloped [them] in intricate stereo panning, atmospheric sounds, and multilayered vocal trickery". The popularity of recreational drugs and mood lamps at the time provided further settings for more focused listening experiences: "This kept the listener rapt to each song: how one flowed into the other, their connecting lyrical content, and the melding of instrumentation."[34]

In comparison to future generations, Campion explains that people growing up in the 1970s found greater value in album listening, in part because of their limited access to any other home entertainment appliance: "Many of them were unable to control the family television or even the kitchen radio. This led to prioritizing of the bedroom or upstairs den: the imagination capsule, locked away inside the headphone dreamscape, studying every corner of the 12-inch artwork and delving deeper into lyrical subtext, whether in ways intended by the artist or not. As if sitting in their own theater of the mind – already hijacked by comic-book fantasy images of horror and science fiction, advertising propaganda, and the American promise of grandeur – they were willing participants in the playful meandering of their rock-and-roll heroes."[34] Adding to this observation, Pareles says, "Pop stars develop staying power when listeners' affection and fascination is transferred from a hit song, or a string of hits, to the singer. Successive songs become a kind of narrative, held together by the image of and fantasies about the performer."[28]

A Rhodes College student listening to the 1969 Yes LP on campus, c. 1970

According to Hogan, with Sgt. Pepper having provided the impetus, the idea of a "concept album" became a marketing tool by the 1970s, as "no shortage of bands used the pretense of 'art' to sell tens of millions of records." Citing hugely successful albums like Pink Floyd's 1973 LP The Dark Side of the Moon, Hogan says "record sales spiraled upward until 1977, when they began ticking downward."[31] This decline is attributed by Pareles to the developments of punk rock and disco in the late 1970s: "Punk returned the focus to the short and noisy song. Disco concentrated on the physical moment when a song makes a body move."[28] Robert Christgau similarly said, "the singles aesthetic began to reassert itself with disco and punk", suggesting this ended the "High Album Era".[35] In a different analysis, historian Matthew Restall observed in this period popular acts struggling to sustain the high level of success afforded to their previous albums. Citing the disappointing receptions of Elton John's Blue Moves (1976) and Fleetwood Mac's Tusk (1979), Restall said, "[These] are dramatic examples of how the recording artists of the great album era ... suffered the receiving end of a horizon of expectations."[36]

The fall of LP record sales at the end of the 1970s marked the end of the LP-driven "golden age".[27] The success of MTV's music video programming also reemphasized the single format in the 1980s and early 1990s. According to Pareles, it soon became apparent that, "after the album-rock era of the 1970s, MTV helped return the hit single to prominence as a pop marketing tool" and influenced record buyers' consuming habits toward more "disposable hits".[28] Pop stars of the 1980s, such as Michael Jackson and Madonna, were able to galvanize interest in their albums by releasing a single or music video to MTV. This led to the development of the modern album launch, intended to drive an album's marketing momentum for an extended period of time, ranging from many weeks and months to more than a year. "Over time, there became an unspoken (and, eventually, baked into the budget) checklist to releasing a major-label pop album", writes Vulture journalist Justin Curto, who cites elements in this model to be an upbeat lead single, an attention-grabbing music video, press coverage, novel merchandise, and the announcement of a supporting concert tour.[37] Dependent on outlets like MTV that exclusively played hit songs, record companies placed more pressure on recording acts to achieve instant commercial success and marketability. "The 1980s and 1990 brought record sales to new peaks while the performers themselves tended to flash and burn out", as Pareles chronicles.[28] Hogan cites Prince, Kate Bush, and Public Enemy – all of whom emerged during this period – as further exceptions in the predominantly white-male "rock-stuffed canon" of the album era.[31]

During this period, the album format consolidated its domination of the recorded music market, first with the brief emergence of the cassette.[27] According to PC Mag columnist John C. Dvorak, "the album era had resulted in too many albums with only one good song on each of them, so cassettes let users do their own mixes", a trend expedited by the introduction of the Sony Walkman in 1979. The introduction of the CD, along with the portable Discman player in 1984, effectively displaced the cassette[38] and began the displacement of LPs in the 1980s as the standard album format for the music industry.[25]

As LPs fell out of favor to CDs, hip hop producers repurposed them as sampling sources, contributing to the development of record collecting.

In the transition to CDs, well-regarded albums of the past were reissued on the format by their original record labels, or the label to whom the album's ownership had been transferred in the event of the original's closure, for instance. However, many LPs were overlooked for digital rerelease "because of legal and contractual problems, as well as simple oversight", Strauss explains.[25] Instead, such records were often rediscovered and collected through the crate digging practices of North American hip hop producers seeking rare sounds to sample for their own recordings. In her account of the 1980s hip hop crate-diggers, media and culture theorist Elodie A. Roy writes, "As they trailed second-hand shops and car boot sales – depositories of unwanted capitalist surplus – diggers were bound to encounter realms of mainstream, mass-produced LP records now fallen out of grace and fashion." This development also contributed to the phenomenon of the "popular collector", which material culture scholar Paul Martin describes as those generally interested in "obtainable, affordable and appealing" items – such as music releases – and attributes to mass production.[39]

Platinum records by Prince, Madonna, and Bruce Springsteen, among others, at Julien's Auctions

According to Pareles, after "the individual song returned as the pop unit" through the 1980s, record companies at the end of the decade began to abstain from releasing hit singles as a means of pressuring consumers to purchase the album on which the single featured.[28] By the end of the 1980s, seven-inch vinyl single sales were dropping and almost entirely displaced by cassette singles, neither of which ultimately sold as well as albums.[27] By the mid-1990s, single song delivery of music to the consumer was almost dead, at least in the US.[40] In 1998, Billboard magazine ended the requirement of a physical single for charting on its Hot 100 chart after several of the year's major hits were not released as singles.[41]

Album production proliferated in the 1990s, with Christgau approximating 35,000 albums worldwide were released each year during the decade.[42] The release of Nirvana's Nevermind (1991) is cited by Eddy as roughly the end of the "high album era",[20] although Strauss writes in 1995 that the "album-rock era" is still in effect.[25] Kot, however, observed a decline in integrity among the industry and artists. He suggested that consumers had been exploited through the decade by increasing prices of CD albums, which are less expensive to produce than vinyl records, and longer run-times with considerably lower-quality music. While acknowledging some recording acts still attempt to abide by ideals from the album era, he said most have renounced their responsibilities as artists and storytellers and embraced indulgent recording practices in order to profit from the CD boom.[23]

In 1999, Kot published a faux obituary for the 33​¹⁄₃ rpm LP form in the Chicago Tribune. In it, he argued that the LP had "been made obsolete by MP3 downloads, movie soundtracks and CD shufflers – not to mention video games, cable television, the Internet and the worldwide explosion of media that prey upon the attention spans of what used to be known as album buyers."[23] That same year, the Internet peer-to-peer file sharing service Napster allowed Internet users to easily download single songs in MP3 format, which had been ripped from the digital files located on CDs.[43] By early 2001, Napster use peaked with 26.4 million users worldwide.[44] Although Napster was shut down in 2001 for copyright violations, several other music download services took its place.[45]

In 2001, Apple Inc.'s iTunes service was introduced and the iPod, a consumer-friendly MP3 player, was released later that year. This and other legal alternatives as well as illicit file sharing continued to depress sales of recorded music on physical formats. By 2006, CD sales were outnumbered for the first time by digital single downloads, with digital music consumers buying singles over albums by a margin of 19:1.[40] By 2009, album sales had more than halved since 1999, declining from a $14.6 to $6.3 billion industry.[46] Recording artists emerged during this era, such as Rihanna, who based their careers on digital singles instead of album sales.[47]

An HMV record shop in Wakefield, England closing its operation in March 2013

With the rise of digital media in the 2000s, the "popular collector" of physical albums had transitioned to the "digital" and "electronic" collector. Of such collectors, Roy says it can be argued they are "not equipped with sufficient archiving knowledge or tools to preserve his/her collection in the long run", citing the vulnerable shelf life of digital files.[39] Concurrently, the demise of physical music stores allowed for websites to emerge as domains for album collecting, including the music review database AllMusic, the streaming service Spotify, and Discogs, which began as a music database before developing into an online marketplace for physical music releases.[48]

The phrase "death of the album" was used in the media during the decline, usually attributing it to Internet sharing and downloading,[49][50] and the changing expectations of music listeners.[51] Capitol-EMI's COO Jeff Kempler said in 2007 that less artists will pursue album-oriented campaigns, while media researcher Aram Sinnreich bluntly predicted the album's death with consumers listening to playlists on their MP3 players instead.[40] In a 2014 interview, Lee Phillips of the Californian entertainment law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips believed the album era had ended and blamed record companies for failing to recognize the inevitability of streaming as the favored means of music distribution and for not working with Napster on a solution.[52]

A smartphone displaying playlists on Spotify, 2010. The streaming service became a dominant and redefining platform for music consumption during the decade.[53]

Music writers in the 2010s, such as Jon Caramanica[54] and Kevin Whitehead,[55] have described this period in the album's history as the "post-album era". Over the course of the decade, record labels generally invested in streaming platforms such as Spotify and Pandora Radio, with strategies focused on curated playlists and individual tracks rather than albums.[2] Reporting at the time for Deseret News, Court Mann said that "services like Spotify and Apple Music have moved our [music] libraries off personal hard drives, iPods and CDs, and into the cloud. Our music is decreasingly self-contained and private."[53] With consumers abandoning albums, more performers focused on releasing singles, a trend which critics felt undermined their artistic potential and produced many one-hit wonders.[56]

While the album format was "dead" commercially, high-profile artists in the early 21st century such as U2, the 1975, Taylor Swift, and Katy Perry still presented their work within a self-defined "album era", says Peter Robinson of The Guardian. Such artists presented their project's aesthetic lifetime in the style of themed album campaigns by performers of the past, such as David Bowie, Madonna, and Pet Shop Boys.[57] Albums were marketed by artists and record labels in extravagant, performance art-like product launches that reached "a nadir" in 2013, according to Vulture writer Lindsay Zoladz, who cites the failed attempts of acts such as Arcade Fire, Kanye West, and Lady Gaga at using visual art and public settings in the strategy: "Gaga's comically excessive ARTPOP campaign featured a Jeff Koons sculpture and a press conference in which she unveiled 'VOLANTIS, the world’s first flying dress'; Daft Punk recorded endless VH1 Classic Albums–esque promotional spots that memorialized Random Access Memories before anybody had even heard it ... and then who could forget [Perry] driving through the streets of L.A. in a gilded 18-wheeler that screamed KATY PERRY PRISM 10-22-13 and looked, uncannily, like a ten-ton brick of Cracker Barrel cheese?"[58] Despite this, Swift remained the music industry's leading adherent and meticulous planner of album-era campaigns through the decade, creating a distinctive art of the strategy, in Curto's opinion.[37]

By the mid 2010s, popular recording artists had embraced the surprise album as a release strategy, issuing their albums with little or no prior announcement and promotion, in part as a way of combatting Internet leaks. This strategy was predated by Radiohead and Bowie but popularized by Beyoncé with her self-titled album in 2013, leading to what Zoladz in 2015 called the "current surprise-album era".[58] The following year, the singer repeated the strategy with her Lemonade album and again proved "the Zeitgeist could be captured and held in just one night", as Curto explains.[37] However, Zoladz went on to report a "collective fatigue" among professional critics and casual listeners from staying connected with surprise releases and the social-media news cycle surrounding them, while highlighting Drake's ability to sustain his popular appeal over time more with single-track releases and thus mastering the digital age's "desire for both instant gratification and long-term anticipation".[58] The latter half of the 2010s trended toward similarly minimal marketing for hip hop album releases, with announcements in the form of social media posts unveiling only the cover art, track listing, or release date a few weeks prior at the most.[37]

Other critics still believed in the album as a viable concept in the 21st century. In 2003, Wired magazine had assigned Christgau to write an article discussing if the album was "a dying art form", to which he concluded: "For as long as artists tour, they'll peddle song collections with the rest of the merch, and those collections will be conceived as artfully as the artists possibly can." In 2019, as CD and digital download sales plummeted and theories still persisted about the "death" of the physical album format, Christgau found his original premise even more valid. "Because the computer giveth as the computer taketh away", he wrote in an essay accompanying the Pazz & Jop music poll that year, explaining that the current affordability of adequate recording equipment makes album production accessible to musicians of various levels of competence. Regarding professional acts, he said, "Writing songs is in their DNA, and if said songs are any good at all, recording them for posterity soon becomes irresistible."[59]

In a year-ending essay on the album in 2019, Ann Powers writes for Slate that the year found the medium in a state of "metamorphosis" rather than dead. In her observation, many recording artists had revitalized the concept album around autobiographical narratives and personal themes, such as intimacy, intersectionality, African-American life, boundaries among women, and grief associated with death. She cites such albums as Brittany Howard's Jaime, Raphael Saadiq's Jimmy Lee, Rapsody's Eve, Jenny Lewis' On the Line, and Nick Cave's Ghosteen.[60] Writing contemporaneously, arts and culture journalist Michelle Zipkin believes albums are still "an integral, relevant, and celebrated component of musical creation and artistry". She cites the review aggregator Metacritic's tabulation of the most acclaimed albums from the 2010s, which showcased musicianship from a diverse range of artists and often serious themes, such as grief, race relations, and identity politics, while adding that, "Albums today offer a fresh way of approaching a changing industry".[2]

By 2019, Swift remained the only artist "who still sells CDs" and had yet to embrace streaming services because they had not compensated recording artists fairly, according to Quartz. Elaborating on this point, Los Angeles Times critic Mikael Wood said, "Yet as she kept her music off Spotify – conditioning her loyal audience to think of buying her songs and albums as an act of devotion – younger artists like [Ariana] Grande emerged to establish themselves as streaming favorites." However, Swift used all major streaming services to release her 2019 album Lover, which Quartz said "might be the last CD we buy" and is "perhaps a final death note for the CD".[61]

Taylor Swift, a longtime adherent to album-era rollouts, surprise-released her albums instead in 2020.

In 2020, album launches were hindered by the COVID-19 pandemic and its related social distancing measures.[37] Between March 6 and 12, physical album sales fell 6% due in part to the pandemic. Later that month, Amazon temporarily suspended incoming shipments of music CDs and vinyl records from U.S. suppliers in an effort to prioritize items deemed more essential.[2]

In response to the pandemic, some major pop stars reimagined their release strategies. Swift surprise-released her albums Folklore and Evermore in July and December, respectively, abandoning a proper rollout campaign for the first time in her career and setting sales and streaming records for the year. Grande, more inspired by rap release strategies, released her album Positions with similarly minimal announcement or promotion. The success of both artists during the pandemic came at the expense of pop stars who had planned traditional album launches, including Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and Dua Lipa. Concurrently, rap albums benefited further from the period's more on-demand consumer and streaming culture, with rappers such as Lil Uzi Vert, Bad Bunny, and DaBaby topping album charts. Writers reporting on the year's releases observed that these trends offered greater connectivity for artists with their listeners during a paradigm-shifting pandemic, while empowering both groups at the expense of major labels.[37]

• Album-equivalent unit
• List of best-selling albums
• List of best-selling albums by country
• Record sales
• Rockism and poptimism

• Cross, Alan (February 2, 2020). "Are you still listening to albums the old-fashioned way? Chances are you're not: Alan Cross". Global News.
• Ducker, Eric (August 19, 2015). "A Rational Conversation: Does Anybody Even Have Time for an 80-Minute Album?". NPR.
• Ivakhiv, Adrian J. (May 8, 2017). "Greatest Albums of the LP Era". immanence.
• Smith, Troy L. (September 21, 2017). "15 Greatest Years in Music History". Cleveland.com.
• Sullivan, Caroline (October 3, 2005). "Death of the album". The Guardian.

• Albumism – online magazine dedicated to album-related content