Psychology
Psychology
Psychology
Psychology
Art, Storytelling, and Emotional Impact of Music Albums
Art, Storytelling, and Emotional Impact of Music Albums
Art, Storytelling, and Emotional Impact of Music Albums
Art, Storytelling, and Emotional Impact of Music Albums
Introduction
The music album era spanned from the 1960s to the early 2000s. We’re no longer in the ‘album era’ because, as a society, we’re moving en masse into streaming services that support singles, liked songs, and curated playlists. This kind of disjointed yet sterilized musical experience has never before existed in the history of music. In earlier decades, if you wanted to listen to music outside of a live event or the radio, you usually purchased an entire album. 45 RPM single records (EPs) existed, but they were nowhere near as popular as buying the entire album. Albums are a more expansive medium for artists to curate a story or a concept. Albums are like musical books, complete with engaging or attractive cover art intent on seducing you to pick it out of the hundreds of other options.
Music Sales
Artists like The Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, and Frank Sinatra started popularizing the sale of albums in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these early albums are still considered among the greatest ever created. A testament to the creative storytelling power this format offers. The Beatles were pivotal in advancing the album art form as they experimented with creative cover art and unique sounds.
Vinyl LP and EP sales peaked from 1978 to 1981 before a dramatic drop off by the end of the 1980s. Vinyl was replaced with eight tracks and cassettes. In the early 1990s, CD sales skyrocketed. This format which was considered to be of higher quality, quickly replaced the formats of the 1980s.
You can see the music revenues separated by format for the past 50 years, from 1977 to 2017. Compact Discs or CDs experienced a rapid rise in sales starting in the late 1980s, just a few years behind cassettes. By the early 2000s, CDs nearly dominated the music industry's revenues. In the last few years, streaming has taken off, but it’s also interesting to see Vinyl growing again for the first time since the late 1970s. Streaming services have free listening options or fairly priced subscriptions, and yet millennials are paying much higher prices to buy vinyl and record players.
As the formats changed and new playback technology was developed, the album form reigned supreme. Instead of large vinyl record covers, album art was adapted to fit inside a cassette or CD case, but consumers still choose albums over singles. The downfall of albums started with the transition to buying and downloading music on the internet. Steve Jobs started selling single songs on iTunes at a reduced price, $1 instead of $10.
Evolution of our Listening Habits
Our relationship with music has dramatically in the last 50 years, as have our listening habits. Music technology has evolved to bring listening into every corner of our lives. LPs provided a way for listeners to buy a piece of music, add it to their personal library, and have total control over it. With the introduction of cassettes, users could combinate different parts of the tape together, effectively creating what we know today as ‘mixtapes.’ CDs added digitalization so that listeners could interact with individual songs more easily. With digital music libraries, listeners started creating new groups of songs called playlists. And in recent years, advancements in machine learning and data science allowed streaming platforms to create personalized playlists based on users listening habits. Technology has altered our listening habits, but is it for the better? Or have we lost particular elements that make listening to music such a transformative emotional experience?
The Album Experience
Albums offer a ‘larger’ experience beyond just the music. From buying to selecting to listening, albums take consumers on a journey that plays into many of our baser natures. This journey is key to why and how albums offer an enhanced musical experience.
Agency – Making a Choice
Agency is a philosophical term that describes our sense of control over our choices, thoughts, and behaviors. According to researcher James Moore, ‘when we make voluntary actions, we tend not to feel as though they simply happen to us, instead we feel as though we are in charge.’ We like having a feeling of agency, we like having control.
Researchers Krause and North found that listeners had a more profound or enjoyable experience when they could control the decision to listen to music and what kind of music they would listen to. Essentially we understand that music can alter our emotions and arousal level, and we want to decide in which direction (happy, sad, aroused, or relaxed) this emotion is going to take us.
With albums, the agency begins when shopping for a new album to buy. In the past, consumers would travel to a local record store. You’d walk up and down the aisles, thumbing through the vinyl and taking in the artwork. You’d flip to the back of the vinyl, reading the list of song names, trying to piece together the type of stories contained in the song lyrics. And you’d consider recommendations your friends might have made. Finally, you’d make a decision. Maybe based on the artwork, maybe it’s your favorite artist or genre, maybe you want to listen to something with a specific emotional appeal, or maybe you heard a song on the radio and want to hear more from that artist. Regardless, this process is about making a choice. It’s about having agency over what you’re going to listen to. This choice lends depth and a sense of satisfaction to the overall listening experience.
Album Art – Visual Accompaniment
Albums offer an expanded experience, not isolated to auditory information. Album covers splashed with beautiful fonts, photographs, and artwork provide a visual experience, while the feeling of the medium in your hand provides a sensorial experience.
Columbia Records unknowingly changed albums forever when they hired a young graphic artist, Alex Steinweiss, in 1938. Steinweiss invented the concept of cover art. Before this, all albums were shipped and sold in plain covers. In less than a decade, cover art had become the standard. Album covers proved a powerful way to connect with consumers because they are the first thing we experience when choosing an album to buy or listen to. The first impression on seeing an album was no longer a bland white cover. Instead, consumers were greeted with various colors, shapes, styles, and other art forms. Albums within the same genre often repeat the same themes or style as a way to tell consumers that this new album is much like that other one they loved.
Album covers may be purely stylistic or aesthetic, with no meaningful association with the album's contents, but the cover art was often intended to accompany the music. Acting as a way for artists to connect with their fans and establish their creative identity.
Albums were shipped in a record sleeve, printed with the cover art and tracklist. Over time this experience changed from the cardboard and paper of a record sleeve to the familiar ribbed edges of a CD case. At this point, we lost some sensorial experience, but the overall impression remained. That is, until music went digital. Now our only sensorial experience with music involves tapping a screen to play some music at random, often seeing the cover in the size of a penny.
Experiencing The Story
An album includes a collection of audio recordings. Most albums have somewhere between 8 to 15 songs. Artists usually have many songs that are contenders for an album, but only a small number of these songs make the cut. Artists and record labels must define what story they want to tell with each album. Many artists try to settle on a theme or general mood, or idea. Often albums are directly linked to a specific emotional experience like a breakup, loss of identity, or starting a family. The musician uses the medium of music to tell the story of their emotional state and how situations made them feel.
These chosen songs are then laid out in a specific order, called a tracklist. Again, there's a story-telling element here. An artist arranges the songs in a specific way to carry you through a rollercoaster of moods. Or the artist can start you off on a specific emotional note and work you through the tracklist, building up to the final emotional resolution. They are trying to create something that moves the listener.
Regardless of the specifics, the idea is that an album is an intentional tracklist of cohesive songs. Albums are intentional pieces of art about discovery, expectation and surprise, and a host of other emotional experiences. Unfortunately, modern music is moving away from this long-standing tradition.
Shortening Attention Spans
Of course, artists are still releasing albums, but fewer and fewer people are purchasing an entire album, let alone listening to it all the way through. Instead, consumers have primarily transitioned to listening to playlists through streaming services. Spotify and Apple Music offer curated or algorithmic playlists based on your unique tastes. Songs are separated from their greater identity within an album and thrown into a massive mix of other genres and artists.
As a result, our music experience has become shallow. There is no depth to our listening. We often pick a playlist and spend the time completely immersed in another task. We don’t even know who the artist is or the song’s name. We listen to a jumbled mix of songs without any context, storytelling, or cohesiveness. Listening to music like this doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t create a moving experience. So why do we continue to choose curated playlists over albums?
Our attention spans are rapidly shortening. Microcontent is all the rage, which is starting to blur into music. We have become accustomed to getting a quick serotonin hit when we watch a funny 15-second TikTok video or a sappy 2-minute Instagram Reel. We want to feel the same hit when we listen to music. And while we crave this hit, it’s an exhausting emotional rollercoaster because it doesn’t allow emotions to proceed to their natural conclusion.
Curated playlists and favorites lists may play a bunch of songs you would naturally enjoy, but the impact is lessened because it’s one after another after another. We may even like a song but quickly skip after the first minute or so because we’re already bored and want to hear a new melody or new beat.
According to Wirebuzz ‘In the mid-1980s, the average time that passed before you would hear the vocals on any radio song was 23 seconds. Today, that number has dropped to just 5 seconds. The music industry is adapting to our shorter attention span…’ Streaming services are impacting how artists compose songs. They know they better hurry up and get to the point, or they’ve already lost us. This diminishing appreciation for music is saddening.
Listen All the Way Through
If you’re feeling a lack of satisfaction with your current listening experiences, try listening to a few albums all the way through. Ritualize a listening session by sitting down with the explicit intention to listen. You can still use a streaming service if you lack access to a record player, CD player, or other physical recording playback technology. Not preferred, but better than the playlist alternative. Start by selecting an artist or genre you’d be interested in and then browse through album cover art. Unfortunately, streaming services don’t prioritize art, so the cover art images you’ll find are small and of poor quality.
Once you’ve selected an album that has a cover that engages you, press play. Don’t shuffle the songs. Ideally, you won’t be interrupted by any ads during the playback. Listen to the album from the first track to the last. Resist the urge to skip any songs, instead following the album through to its full conclusion.
After you listen to a few albums like this, you’ll feel better. It’s re-establishing the cadence of a longer format in your brain, but your brain adapts quickly. Your emotions won’t be yanked around by the chaos of a curated playlist. Hopefully, we can reconnect with this superior form of storytelling within the music industry, or else we risk further interrupting musics' ability to alter us on an emotional level.
Introduction
The music album era spanned from the 1960s to the early 2000s. We’re no longer in the ‘album era’ because, as a society, we’re moving en masse into streaming services that support singles, liked songs, and curated playlists. This kind of disjointed yet sterilized musical experience has never before existed in the history of music. In earlier decades, if you wanted to listen to music outside of a live event or the radio, you usually purchased an entire album. 45 RPM single records (EPs) existed, but they were nowhere near as popular as buying the entire album. Albums are a more expansive medium for artists to curate a story or a concept. Albums are like musical books, complete with engaging or attractive cover art intent on seducing you to pick it out of the hundreds of other options.
Music Sales
Artists like The Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, and Frank Sinatra started popularizing the sale of albums in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these early albums are still considered among the greatest ever created. A testament to the creative storytelling power this format offers. The Beatles were pivotal in advancing the album art form as they experimented with creative cover art and unique sounds.
Vinyl LP and EP sales peaked from 1978 to 1981 before a dramatic drop off by the end of the 1980s. Vinyl was replaced with eight tracks and cassettes. In the early 1990s, CD sales skyrocketed. This format which was considered to be of higher quality, quickly replaced the formats of the 1980s.
You can see the music revenues separated by format for the past 50 years, from 1977 to 2017. Compact Discs or CDs experienced a rapid rise in sales starting in the late 1980s, just a few years behind cassettes. By the early 2000s, CDs nearly dominated the music industry's revenues. In the last few years, streaming has taken off, but it’s also interesting to see Vinyl growing again for the first time since the late 1970s. Streaming services have free listening options or fairly priced subscriptions, and yet millennials are paying much higher prices to buy vinyl and record players.
As the formats changed and new playback technology was developed, the album form reigned supreme. Instead of large vinyl record covers, album art was adapted to fit inside a cassette or CD case, but consumers still choose albums over singles. The downfall of albums started with the transition to buying and downloading music on the internet. Steve Jobs started selling single songs on iTunes at a reduced price, $1 instead of $10.
Evolution of our Listening Habits
Our relationship with music has dramatically in the last 50 years, as have our listening habits. Music technology has evolved to bring listening into every corner of our lives. LPs provided a way for listeners to buy a piece of music, add it to their personal library, and have total control over it. With the introduction of cassettes, users could combinate different parts of the tape together, effectively creating what we know today as ‘mixtapes.’ CDs added digitalization so that listeners could interact with individual songs more easily. With digital music libraries, listeners started creating new groups of songs called playlists. And in recent years, advancements in machine learning and data science allowed streaming platforms to create personalized playlists based on users listening habits. Technology has altered our listening habits, but is it for the better? Or have we lost particular elements that make listening to music such a transformative emotional experience?
The Album Experience
Albums offer a ‘larger’ experience beyond just the music. From buying to selecting to listening, albums take consumers on a journey that plays into many of our baser natures. This journey is key to why and how albums offer an enhanced musical experience.
Agency – Making a Choice
Agency is a philosophical term that describes our sense of control over our choices, thoughts, and behaviors. According to researcher James Moore, ‘when we make voluntary actions, we tend not to feel as though they simply happen to us, instead we feel as though we are in charge.’ We like having a feeling of agency, we like having control.
Researchers Krause and North found that listeners had a more profound or enjoyable experience when they could control the decision to listen to music and what kind of music they would listen to. Essentially we understand that music can alter our emotions and arousal level, and we want to decide in which direction (happy, sad, aroused, or relaxed) this emotion is going to take us.
With albums, the agency begins when shopping for a new album to buy. In the past, consumers would travel to a local record store. You’d walk up and down the aisles, thumbing through the vinyl and taking in the artwork. You’d flip to the back of the vinyl, reading the list of song names, trying to piece together the type of stories contained in the song lyrics. And you’d consider recommendations your friends might have made. Finally, you’d make a decision. Maybe based on the artwork, maybe it’s your favorite artist or genre, maybe you want to listen to something with a specific emotional appeal, or maybe you heard a song on the radio and want to hear more from that artist. Regardless, this process is about making a choice. It’s about having agency over what you’re going to listen to. This choice lends depth and a sense of satisfaction to the overall listening experience.
Album Art – Visual Accompaniment
Albums offer an expanded experience, not isolated to auditory information. Album covers splashed with beautiful fonts, photographs, and artwork provide a visual experience, while the feeling of the medium in your hand provides a sensorial experience.
Columbia Records unknowingly changed albums forever when they hired a young graphic artist, Alex Steinweiss, in 1938. Steinweiss invented the concept of cover art. Before this, all albums were shipped and sold in plain covers. In less than a decade, cover art had become the standard. Album covers proved a powerful way to connect with consumers because they are the first thing we experience when choosing an album to buy or listen to. The first impression on seeing an album was no longer a bland white cover. Instead, consumers were greeted with various colors, shapes, styles, and other art forms. Albums within the same genre often repeat the same themes or style as a way to tell consumers that this new album is much like that other one they loved.
Album covers may be purely stylistic or aesthetic, with no meaningful association with the album's contents, but the cover art was often intended to accompany the music. Acting as a way for artists to connect with their fans and establish their creative identity.
Albums were shipped in a record sleeve, printed with the cover art and tracklist. Over time this experience changed from the cardboard and paper of a record sleeve to the familiar ribbed edges of a CD case. At this point, we lost some sensorial experience, but the overall impression remained. That is, until music went digital. Now our only sensorial experience with music involves tapping a screen to play some music at random, often seeing the cover in the size of a penny.
Experiencing The Story
An album includes a collection of audio recordings. Most albums have somewhere between 8 to 15 songs. Artists usually have many songs that are contenders for an album, but only a small number of these songs make the cut. Artists and record labels must define what story they want to tell with each album. Many artists try to settle on a theme or general mood, or idea. Often albums are directly linked to a specific emotional experience like a breakup, loss of identity, or starting a family. The musician uses the medium of music to tell the story of their emotional state and how situations made them feel.
These chosen songs are then laid out in a specific order, called a tracklist. Again, there's a story-telling element here. An artist arranges the songs in a specific way to carry you through a rollercoaster of moods. Or the artist can start you off on a specific emotional note and work you through the tracklist, building up to the final emotional resolution. They are trying to create something that moves the listener.
Regardless of the specifics, the idea is that an album is an intentional tracklist of cohesive songs. Albums are intentional pieces of art about discovery, expectation and surprise, and a host of other emotional experiences. Unfortunately, modern music is moving away from this long-standing tradition.
Shortening Attention Spans
Of course, artists are still releasing albums, but fewer and fewer people are purchasing an entire album, let alone listening to it all the way through. Instead, consumers have primarily transitioned to listening to playlists through streaming services. Spotify and Apple Music offer curated or algorithmic playlists based on your unique tastes. Songs are separated from their greater identity within an album and thrown into a massive mix of other genres and artists.
As a result, our music experience has become shallow. There is no depth to our listening. We often pick a playlist and spend the time completely immersed in another task. We don’t even know who the artist is or the song’s name. We listen to a jumbled mix of songs without any context, storytelling, or cohesiveness. Listening to music like this doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t create a moving experience. So why do we continue to choose curated playlists over albums?
Our attention spans are rapidly shortening. Microcontent is all the rage, which is starting to blur into music. We have become accustomed to getting a quick serotonin hit when we watch a funny 15-second TikTok video or a sappy 2-minute Instagram Reel. We want to feel the same hit when we listen to music. And while we crave this hit, it’s an exhausting emotional rollercoaster because it doesn’t allow emotions to proceed to their natural conclusion.
Curated playlists and favorites lists may play a bunch of songs you would naturally enjoy, but the impact is lessened because it’s one after another after another. We may even like a song but quickly skip after the first minute or so because we’re already bored and want to hear a new melody or new beat.
According to Wirebuzz ‘In the mid-1980s, the average time that passed before you would hear the vocals on any radio song was 23 seconds. Today, that number has dropped to just 5 seconds. The music industry is adapting to our shorter attention span…’ Streaming services are impacting how artists compose songs. They know they better hurry up and get to the point, or they’ve already lost us. This diminishing appreciation for music is saddening.
Listen All the Way Through
If you’re feeling a lack of satisfaction with your current listening experiences, try listening to a few albums all the way through. Ritualize a listening session by sitting down with the explicit intention to listen. You can still use a streaming service if you lack access to a record player, CD player, or other physical recording playback technology. Not preferred, but better than the playlist alternative. Start by selecting an artist or genre you’d be interested in and then browse through album cover art. Unfortunately, streaming services don’t prioritize art, so the cover art images you’ll find are small and of poor quality.
Once you’ve selected an album that has a cover that engages you, press play. Don’t shuffle the songs. Ideally, you won’t be interrupted by any ads during the playback. Listen to the album from the first track to the last. Resist the urge to skip any songs, instead following the album through to its full conclusion.
After you listen to a few albums like this, you’ll feel better. It’s re-establishing the cadence of a longer format in your brain, but your brain adapts quickly. Your emotions won’t be yanked around by the chaos of a curated playlist. Hopefully, we can reconnect with this superior form of storytelling within the music industry, or else we risk further interrupting musics' ability to alter us on an emotional level.
Introduction
The music album era spanned from the 1960s to the early 2000s. We’re no longer in the ‘album era’ because, as a society, we’re moving en masse into streaming services that support singles, liked songs, and curated playlists. This kind of disjointed yet sterilized musical experience has never before existed in the history of music. In earlier decades, if you wanted to listen to music outside of a live event or the radio, you usually purchased an entire album. 45 RPM single records (EPs) existed, but they were nowhere near as popular as buying the entire album. Albums are a more expansive medium for artists to curate a story or a concept. Albums are like musical books, complete with engaging or attractive cover art intent on seducing you to pick it out of the hundreds of other options.
Music Sales
Artists like The Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, and Frank Sinatra started popularizing the sale of albums in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these early albums are still considered among the greatest ever created. A testament to the creative storytelling power this format offers. The Beatles were pivotal in advancing the album art form as they experimented with creative cover art and unique sounds.
Vinyl LP and EP sales peaked from 1978 to 1981 before a dramatic drop off by the end of the 1980s. Vinyl was replaced with eight tracks and cassettes. In the early 1990s, CD sales skyrocketed. This format which was considered to be of higher quality, quickly replaced the formats of the 1980s.
You can see the music revenues separated by format for the past 50 years, from 1977 to 2017. Compact Discs or CDs experienced a rapid rise in sales starting in the late 1980s, just a few years behind cassettes. By the early 2000s, CDs nearly dominated the music industry's revenues. In the last few years, streaming has taken off, but it’s also interesting to see Vinyl growing again for the first time since the late 1970s. Streaming services have free listening options or fairly priced subscriptions, and yet millennials are paying much higher prices to buy vinyl and record players.
As the formats changed and new playback technology was developed, the album form reigned supreme. Instead of large vinyl record covers, album art was adapted to fit inside a cassette or CD case, but consumers still choose albums over singles. The downfall of albums started with the transition to buying and downloading music on the internet. Steve Jobs started selling single songs on iTunes at a reduced price, $1 instead of $10.
Evolution of our Listening Habits
Our relationship with music has dramatically in the last 50 years, as have our listening habits. Music technology has evolved to bring listening into every corner of our lives. LPs provided a way for listeners to buy a piece of music, add it to their personal library, and have total control over it. With the introduction of cassettes, users could combinate different parts of the tape together, effectively creating what we know today as ‘mixtapes.’ CDs added digitalization so that listeners could interact with individual songs more easily. With digital music libraries, listeners started creating new groups of songs called playlists. And in recent years, advancements in machine learning and data science allowed streaming platforms to create personalized playlists based on users listening habits. Technology has altered our listening habits, but is it for the better? Or have we lost particular elements that make listening to music such a transformative emotional experience?
The Album Experience
Albums offer a ‘larger’ experience beyond just the music. From buying to selecting to listening, albums take consumers on a journey that plays into many of our baser natures. This journey is key to why and how albums offer an enhanced musical experience.
Agency – Making a Choice
Agency is a philosophical term that describes our sense of control over our choices, thoughts, and behaviors. According to researcher James Moore, ‘when we make voluntary actions, we tend not to feel as though they simply happen to us, instead we feel as though we are in charge.’ We like having a feeling of agency, we like having control.
Researchers Krause and North found that listeners had a more profound or enjoyable experience when they could control the decision to listen to music and what kind of music they would listen to. Essentially we understand that music can alter our emotions and arousal level, and we want to decide in which direction (happy, sad, aroused, or relaxed) this emotion is going to take us.
With albums, the agency begins when shopping for a new album to buy. In the past, consumers would travel to a local record store. You’d walk up and down the aisles, thumbing through the vinyl and taking in the artwork. You’d flip to the back of the vinyl, reading the list of song names, trying to piece together the type of stories contained in the song lyrics. And you’d consider recommendations your friends might have made. Finally, you’d make a decision. Maybe based on the artwork, maybe it’s your favorite artist or genre, maybe you want to listen to something with a specific emotional appeal, or maybe you heard a song on the radio and want to hear more from that artist. Regardless, this process is about making a choice. It’s about having agency over what you’re going to listen to. This choice lends depth and a sense of satisfaction to the overall listening experience.
Album Art – Visual Accompaniment
Albums offer an expanded experience, not isolated to auditory information. Album covers splashed with beautiful fonts, photographs, and artwork provide a visual experience, while the feeling of the medium in your hand provides a sensorial experience.
Columbia Records unknowingly changed albums forever when they hired a young graphic artist, Alex Steinweiss, in 1938. Steinweiss invented the concept of cover art. Before this, all albums were shipped and sold in plain covers. In less than a decade, cover art had become the standard. Album covers proved a powerful way to connect with consumers because they are the first thing we experience when choosing an album to buy or listen to. The first impression on seeing an album was no longer a bland white cover. Instead, consumers were greeted with various colors, shapes, styles, and other art forms. Albums within the same genre often repeat the same themes or style as a way to tell consumers that this new album is much like that other one they loved.
Album covers may be purely stylistic or aesthetic, with no meaningful association with the album's contents, but the cover art was often intended to accompany the music. Acting as a way for artists to connect with their fans and establish their creative identity.
Albums were shipped in a record sleeve, printed with the cover art and tracklist. Over time this experience changed from the cardboard and paper of a record sleeve to the familiar ribbed edges of a CD case. At this point, we lost some sensorial experience, but the overall impression remained. That is, until music went digital. Now our only sensorial experience with music involves tapping a screen to play some music at random, often seeing the cover in the size of a penny.
Experiencing The Story
An album includes a collection of audio recordings. Most albums have somewhere between 8 to 15 songs. Artists usually have many songs that are contenders for an album, but only a small number of these songs make the cut. Artists and record labels must define what story they want to tell with each album. Many artists try to settle on a theme or general mood, or idea. Often albums are directly linked to a specific emotional experience like a breakup, loss of identity, or starting a family. The musician uses the medium of music to tell the story of their emotional state and how situations made them feel.
These chosen songs are then laid out in a specific order, called a tracklist. Again, there's a story-telling element here. An artist arranges the songs in a specific way to carry you through a rollercoaster of moods. Or the artist can start you off on a specific emotional note and work you through the tracklist, building up to the final emotional resolution. They are trying to create something that moves the listener.
Regardless of the specifics, the idea is that an album is an intentional tracklist of cohesive songs. Albums are intentional pieces of art about discovery, expectation and surprise, and a host of other emotional experiences. Unfortunately, modern music is moving away from this long-standing tradition.
Shortening Attention Spans
Of course, artists are still releasing albums, but fewer and fewer people are purchasing an entire album, let alone listening to it all the way through. Instead, consumers have primarily transitioned to listening to playlists through streaming services. Spotify and Apple Music offer curated or algorithmic playlists based on your unique tastes. Songs are separated from their greater identity within an album and thrown into a massive mix of other genres and artists.
As a result, our music experience has become shallow. There is no depth to our listening. We often pick a playlist and spend the time completely immersed in another task. We don’t even know who the artist is or the song’s name. We listen to a jumbled mix of songs without any context, storytelling, or cohesiveness. Listening to music like this doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t create a moving experience. So why do we continue to choose curated playlists over albums?
Our attention spans are rapidly shortening. Microcontent is all the rage, which is starting to blur into music. We have become accustomed to getting a quick serotonin hit when we watch a funny 15-second TikTok video or a sappy 2-minute Instagram Reel. We want to feel the same hit when we listen to music. And while we crave this hit, it’s an exhausting emotional rollercoaster because it doesn’t allow emotions to proceed to their natural conclusion.
Curated playlists and favorites lists may play a bunch of songs you would naturally enjoy, but the impact is lessened because it’s one after another after another. We may even like a song but quickly skip after the first minute or so because we’re already bored and want to hear a new melody or new beat.
According to Wirebuzz ‘In the mid-1980s, the average time that passed before you would hear the vocals on any radio song was 23 seconds. Today, that number has dropped to just 5 seconds. The music industry is adapting to our shorter attention span…’ Streaming services are impacting how artists compose songs. They know they better hurry up and get to the point, or they’ve already lost us. This diminishing appreciation for music is saddening.
Listen All the Way Through
If you’re feeling a lack of satisfaction with your current listening experiences, try listening to a few albums all the way through. Ritualize a listening session by sitting down with the explicit intention to listen. You can still use a streaming service if you lack access to a record player, CD player, or other physical recording playback technology. Not preferred, but better than the playlist alternative. Start by selecting an artist or genre you’d be interested in and then browse through album cover art. Unfortunately, streaming services don’t prioritize art, so the cover art images you’ll find are small and of poor quality.
Once you’ve selected an album that has a cover that engages you, press play. Don’t shuffle the songs. Ideally, you won’t be interrupted by any ads during the playback. Listen to the album from the first track to the last. Resist the urge to skip any songs, instead following the album through to its full conclusion.
After you listen to a few albums like this, you’ll feel better. It’s re-establishing the cadence of a longer format in your brain, but your brain adapts quickly. Your emotions won’t be yanked around by the chaos of a curated playlist. Hopefully, we can reconnect with this superior form of storytelling within the music industry, or else we risk further interrupting musics' ability to alter us on an emotional level.
Introduction
The music album era spanned from the 1960s to the early 2000s. We’re no longer in the ‘album era’ because, as a society, we’re moving en masse into streaming services that support singles, liked songs, and curated playlists. This kind of disjointed yet sterilized musical experience has never before existed in the history of music. In earlier decades, if you wanted to listen to music outside of a live event or the radio, you usually purchased an entire album. 45 RPM single records (EPs) existed, but they were nowhere near as popular as buying the entire album. Albums are a more expansive medium for artists to curate a story or a concept. Albums are like musical books, complete with engaging or attractive cover art intent on seducing you to pick it out of the hundreds of other options.
Music Sales
Artists like The Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, and Frank Sinatra started popularizing the sale of albums in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these early albums are still considered among the greatest ever created. A testament to the creative storytelling power this format offers. The Beatles were pivotal in advancing the album art form as they experimented with creative cover art and unique sounds.
Vinyl LP and EP sales peaked from 1978 to 1981 before a dramatic drop off by the end of the 1980s. Vinyl was replaced with eight tracks and cassettes. In the early 1990s, CD sales skyrocketed. This format which was considered to be of higher quality, quickly replaced the formats of the 1980s.
You can see the music revenues separated by format for the past 50 years, from 1977 to 2017. Compact Discs or CDs experienced a rapid rise in sales starting in the late 1980s, just a few years behind cassettes. By the early 2000s, CDs nearly dominated the music industry's revenues. In the last few years, streaming has taken off, but it’s also interesting to see Vinyl growing again for the first time since the late 1970s. Streaming services have free listening options or fairly priced subscriptions, and yet millennials are paying much higher prices to buy vinyl and record players.
As the formats changed and new playback technology was developed, the album form reigned supreme. Instead of large vinyl record covers, album art was adapted to fit inside a cassette or CD case, but consumers still choose albums over singles. The downfall of albums started with the transition to buying and downloading music on the internet. Steve Jobs started selling single songs on iTunes at a reduced price, $1 instead of $10.
Evolution of our Listening Habits
Our relationship with music has dramatically in the last 50 years, as have our listening habits. Music technology has evolved to bring listening into every corner of our lives. LPs provided a way for listeners to buy a piece of music, add it to their personal library, and have total control over it. With the introduction of cassettes, users could combinate different parts of the tape together, effectively creating what we know today as ‘mixtapes.’ CDs added digitalization so that listeners could interact with individual songs more easily. With digital music libraries, listeners started creating new groups of songs called playlists. And in recent years, advancements in machine learning and data science allowed streaming platforms to create personalized playlists based on users listening habits. Technology has altered our listening habits, but is it for the better? Or have we lost particular elements that make listening to music such a transformative emotional experience?
The Album Experience
Albums offer a ‘larger’ experience beyond just the music. From buying to selecting to listening, albums take consumers on a journey that plays into many of our baser natures. This journey is key to why and how albums offer an enhanced musical experience.
Agency – Making a Choice
Agency is a philosophical term that describes our sense of control over our choices, thoughts, and behaviors. According to researcher James Moore, ‘when we make voluntary actions, we tend not to feel as though they simply happen to us, instead we feel as though we are in charge.’ We like having a feeling of agency, we like having control.
Researchers Krause and North found that listeners had a more profound or enjoyable experience when they could control the decision to listen to music and what kind of music they would listen to. Essentially we understand that music can alter our emotions and arousal level, and we want to decide in which direction (happy, sad, aroused, or relaxed) this emotion is going to take us.
With albums, the agency begins when shopping for a new album to buy. In the past, consumers would travel to a local record store. You’d walk up and down the aisles, thumbing through the vinyl and taking in the artwork. You’d flip to the back of the vinyl, reading the list of song names, trying to piece together the type of stories contained in the song lyrics. And you’d consider recommendations your friends might have made. Finally, you’d make a decision. Maybe based on the artwork, maybe it’s your favorite artist or genre, maybe you want to listen to something with a specific emotional appeal, or maybe you heard a song on the radio and want to hear more from that artist. Regardless, this process is about making a choice. It’s about having agency over what you’re going to listen to. This choice lends depth and a sense of satisfaction to the overall listening experience.
Album Art – Visual Accompaniment
Albums offer an expanded experience, not isolated to auditory information. Album covers splashed with beautiful fonts, photographs, and artwork provide a visual experience, while the feeling of the medium in your hand provides a sensorial experience.
Columbia Records unknowingly changed albums forever when they hired a young graphic artist, Alex Steinweiss, in 1938. Steinweiss invented the concept of cover art. Before this, all albums were shipped and sold in plain covers. In less than a decade, cover art had become the standard. Album covers proved a powerful way to connect with consumers because they are the first thing we experience when choosing an album to buy or listen to. The first impression on seeing an album was no longer a bland white cover. Instead, consumers were greeted with various colors, shapes, styles, and other art forms. Albums within the same genre often repeat the same themes or style as a way to tell consumers that this new album is much like that other one they loved.
Album covers may be purely stylistic or aesthetic, with no meaningful association with the album's contents, but the cover art was often intended to accompany the music. Acting as a way for artists to connect with their fans and establish their creative identity.
Albums were shipped in a record sleeve, printed with the cover art and tracklist. Over time this experience changed from the cardboard and paper of a record sleeve to the familiar ribbed edges of a CD case. At this point, we lost some sensorial experience, but the overall impression remained. That is, until music went digital. Now our only sensorial experience with music involves tapping a screen to play some music at random, often seeing the cover in the size of a penny.
Experiencing The Story
An album includes a collection of audio recordings. Most albums have somewhere between 8 to 15 songs. Artists usually have many songs that are contenders for an album, but only a small number of these songs make the cut. Artists and record labels must define what story they want to tell with each album. Many artists try to settle on a theme or general mood, or idea. Often albums are directly linked to a specific emotional experience like a breakup, loss of identity, or starting a family. The musician uses the medium of music to tell the story of their emotional state and how situations made them feel.
These chosen songs are then laid out in a specific order, called a tracklist. Again, there's a story-telling element here. An artist arranges the songs in a specific way to carry you through a rollercoaster of moods. Or the artist can start you off on a specific emotional note and work you through the tracklist, building up to the final emotional resolution. They are trying to create something that moves the listener.
Regardless of the specifics, the idea is that an album is an intentional tracklist of cohesive songs. Albums are intentional pieces of art about discovery, expectation and surprise, and a host of other emotional experiences. Unfortunately, modern music is moving away from this long-standing tradition.
Shortening Attention Spans
Of course, artists are still releasing albums, but fewer and fewer people are purchasing an entire album, let alone listening to it all the way through. Instead, consumers have primarily transitioned to listening to playlists through streaming services. Spotify and Apple Music offer curated or algorithmic playlists based on your unique tastes. Songs are separated from their greater identity within an album and thrown into a massive mix of other genres and artists.
As a result, our music experience has become shallow. There is no depth to our listening. We often pick a playlist and spend the time completely immersed in another task. We don’t even know who the artist is or the song’s name. We listen to a jumbled mix of songs without any context, storytelling, or cohesiveness. Listening to music like this doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t create a moving experience. So why do we continue to choose curated playlists over albums?
Our attention spans are rapidly shortening. Microcontent is all the rage, which is starting to blur into music. We have become accustomed to getting a quick serotonin hit when we watch a funny 15-second TikTok video or a sappy 2-minute Instagram Reel. We want to feel the same hit when we listen to music. And while we crave this hit, it’s an exhausting emotional rollercoaster because it doesn’t allow emotions to proceed to their natural conclusion.
Curated playlists and favorites lists may play a bunch of songs you would naturally enjoy, but the impact is lessened because it’s one after another after another. We may even like a song but quickly skip after the first minute or so because we’re already bored and want to hear a new melody or new beat.
According to Wirebuzz ‘In the mid-1980s, the average time that passed before you would hear the vocals on any radio song was 23 seconds. Today, that number has dropped to just 5 seconds. The music industry is adapting to our shorter attention span…’ Streaming services are impacting how artists compose songs. They know they better hurry up and get to the point, or they’ve already lost us. This diminishing appreciation for music is saddening.
Listen All the Way Through
If you’re feeling a lack of satisfaction with your current listening experiences, try listening to a few albums all the way through. Ritualize a listening session by sitting down with the explicit intention to listen. You can still use a streaming service if you lack access to a record player, CD player, or other physical recording playback technology. Not preferred, but better than the playlist alternative. Start by selecting an artist or genre you’d be interested in and then browse through album cover art. Unfortunately, streaming services don’t prioritize art, so the cover art images you’ll find are small and of poor quality.
Once you’ve selected an album that has a cover that engages you, press play. Don’t shuffle the songs. Ideally, you won’t be interrupted by any ads during the playback. Listen to the album from the first track to the last. Resist the urge to skip any songs, instead following the album through to its full conclusion.
After you listen to a few albums like this, you’ll feel better. It’s re-establishing the cadence of a longer format in your brain, but your brain adapts quickly. Your emotions won’t be yanked around by the chaos of a curated playlist. Hopefully, we can reconnect with this superior form of storytelling within the music industry, or else we risk further interrupting musics' ability to alter us on an emotional level.
Artists and record labels must define what story they want to tell with each album. Many artists try to settle on a theme or general mood, or idea.
Artists and record labels must define what story they want to tell with each album. Many artists try to settle on a theme or general mood, or idea.
Artists and record labels must define what story they want to tell with each album. Many artists try to settle on a theme or general mood, or idea.
Artists and record labels must define what story they want to tell with each album. Many artists try to settle on a theme or general mood, or idea.
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Cutting-edge startup redefining sensory experiences. We create unparalleled technology for immersion in auditory landscapes.
Copyright ©2024 VA Visual Acoustic Technologies GmbH. All rights reserved.
Cutting-edge startup redefining sensory experiences. We create unparalleled technology for immersion in auditory landscapes.
Copyright ©2024 VA Visual Acoustic Technologies GmbH. All rights reserved.
Cutting-edge startup redefining sensory experiences. We create unparalleled technology for immersion in auditory landscapes.
Copyright ©2024 VA Visual Acoustic Technologies GmbH. All rights reserved.
Cutting-edge startup redefining sensory experiences. We create unparalleled technology for immersion in auditory landscapes.
Copyright ©2024 VA Visual Acoustic Technologies GmbH. All rights reserved.