Albums used to be long format groupings of songs that had a common theme between them all. Nowadays, albums just seem like a loose grouping of songs that were made around the same time.
When listening to older albums from the 1960’s to 1980’s there seems to be a pattern with popular albums that tell a story.
A band who was amazing at telling a story through their albums was Pink Floyd. They had multiple albums centered around a single theme and would sometimes split a song into multiple parts to break it up.
“Wish You Were Here,” which is considered one of their best albums, utilizes this idea of breaking up a song very well.
The album starts with parts one through five of a song, has a four-song break, then finishes with parts six through nine of that song.
As the era of streaming services has started to reach popularity, albums like Pink Floyd’s are starting to become rarer.
The main music streaming services of this decade are Spotify and Apple Music. Both streaming services work in roughly the same way when it comes to paying artists.
Spotify pays fractions of a cent per stream whereas Apple Music pays out when a song reaches thousands of streams, but both are comparable in the amount they pay out.
This creates a problem with music. Now artists are less likely to create an entire solid album to sell CD’s or records, but rather push out shorter songs that are better by themselves to encourage streams.
There are a few artists that haven’t fully succumbed to this idea though. One of the more prominent artists is Childish Gambino, who makes all his songs on his albums relate to each other and tell a story together.
“Because the Internet” by Childish Gambino is the best example of this. Not only did he tell a story through the music, but he also wrote a screenplay to go along with the album.
As we enter a new age of social media with apps like Tik Tok taking the frontline, a new type of music has started to emerge.
Rather than having one song from an album be good to gain streams, artists only need a few good seconds on a song to gain use of it on Tik Tok. After posting on Tik Tok, artists subsequently see more streams on Spotify and Apple Music.
The music scene will forever be changing. Humanity went from classical orchestral pieces to full length albums. Now individual songs are starting to take the forefront. What will be the next major step in music evolution?
Connor Anderson can be reached at [email protected]