This summer, I listened to “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” on vinyl for the first time.
On Fridays, each intern was given the stomach-turning, impossible task of selecting a record from the label owner’s vast, sprawling expanse of a vinyl collection. For fear of groans and shudders from my fellow audiophiles, I chose “Slowdive” by Slowdive, essentially a cop out, as I expressed my praise for the album every morning when I arrived in the office after listening on the subway.
Directly following the close of the eight-minute shoegaze finisher, “Falling Ashes,” my fellow intern jumped at his chance to woo the room. A hushed, tense silence fell over the room until Kanye West’s “Dark Fantasy” dribbled through the speakers. I smiled. I mean, what an impeccable end to the week? But I soon became very distracted.
I listen to single tracks from “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” sporadically as needed. “Runaway,” “Devil in a New Dress,” “Monster,” are stand-alone tracks, but when listened to in order, a whole different arena is made available. The myriad of details across every track form the puzzle pieces that make a cohesive picture, or album. A story can be told, a theme can be represented, a feeling can be emoted. The representation of these ideas can be best inferred through listening to an album in its entirety.
While I’ve often listened to “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” prior to this experience, I was hip to the ever-present skip button, easily accessed on my keyboard with a single reach of my finger. I was cognizant of the upcoming tracks and would speed the process along so that I might get to “Runaway” as fast as I can.
Artists are controlled by the need to stay relevant in the modern-day music climate. Streaming services make this necessity even more urgent. Competition for streams continues to expand as the amount of artists in the market multiplies because of the ease of entry. This obstacle facing artists undermines the importance of albums and instead emphasizes the allure of singles, making the art of album listening irrelevant.
Spotify allows for single-only listening to run rampant, especially with playlists like “Rap Caviar.” The user can hit shuffle and mindlessly listen to tracks spanning different artists with competing messages and varying tones. While this makes exploration and discovery simple, this makes the user desire, or demand, instant gratification when listening to new music.
Listeners are only exposing themselves to one or two tracks from each artist when they shuffle a Spotify-curated playlist. The average length of a song on the Top 100 charts is three minutes, or 180 seconds. This means that artists have six minutes, or 360 seconds, on average, to impress a listener. Because of this, artists are responding by releasing singles rapidly and frequently. The art of the album release is diminished. While this is certainly not a universal issue, the pressure to release music is imminent and weighing upon artists.
Singles may be the current operating system for artists, but albums provide a uniquely revealing, expressive and eye-opening experience for the listener, which cannot be replaced. This is incredibly obvious, but artists write lyrics, compose music, record tracks and piece together albums with the most purposeful intentions in order to create a product they are satisfied with. Listening to the album in totality, allows the listener to catch up with the artist. They are given the ability to zoom in on a certain place, or status, of the artist’s mind. Albums are much larger than the singles we are exposed to. Invest in albums by actively listening: the truest form of music appreciation.
