I agree with your points, but this isn’t something which has arrived with iTunes (although the internet has certainly made it much worse) – it’s been gradually creeping up on us more and more as radio stations only play a narrow selection of what is likely to sell; shops will have a dozen copies of the latest CD by a bland boy-band but nothing by many reasonably well-known artists.

And is doesn’t only affect the rock/pop genre, either. Classical music suffers in the same way. I’ve heard Classic FM announce that they are palying ‘Beethoven’s 9th symphony’, when in fact they are only playing the well-known 4th movement; it works so much better coming after the three movements which precede it, but is rarely heard on air in its entirety.

It’s all part of the process of promoting bland commercialism over talent. What succeeds is what is heavily promoted, not necessarily what is actually any good. The internet has certainly made this worse.

It isn’t all bad, though. Obscure internet radio stations, which then lead to looking at the websites of obscure bands, can reveal unexpected gems in a way that browsing in a modern-day CD shop never will.

Mr. Bayon you are SO correct.

For one, I hardly ever use playlists… I think I’ve created one, once, ever, whilst bored on a train. I either listen to an album or, if I’m in an unsure mood just shuffle all tracks, or a particular genre, of what I already own on my iPod or PC.
If I want to expand my musical horizon’s I think last.fm is well worth a go… It had recently unearthed a gem for me. A favourite artists new project I hadn’t heard about.

Lise, I saw about the Carter and EMF gig on the day of (thanks to last.fm again, in fact) and it was far to late to do anything about it. I’ll be the Brixton Academy was rocking that night! Lovely, lovely Carter…
I think there is / was one in Birmingham.

Over here (Germany), after the radio news, they are not allowed to play English (or other foreign language) tracks, because they have had a few bloopers over the years while the DJs don’t always understand the lyrics of foreign language songs and have ended up offending people!

That said, Zappa’s “Bobby Brown” seems to be one of the most popular tracks from the 80s, yet nobody finds it appalling – until I actually translate the lyrics for them!

I would say 99% of my music listening is the radio in the car, which is usually a mish mash of the “best of the 80s, 90s and today” – although the 80s seems to have consisted of around 15 or 20 tracks… :-S

I like the principle of albums, but generally I only have time to listen to one or two tracks anyway, or I only like one or two tracks from an album… Likewise, if you are at a party, in a club, listening to the radio etc. most people don’t want to listen to an hour of music from one artist.

I think the death of the album has been a long and particularly slow one. It’s only now that everyone’s begun to strop about it, however. The 60/70 minute playing time of CDs long exceeded the average persons attention span and was, in my opinion, the herald of inexorable demise for the album.

Personally, I like nothing better than dusting off my old Led Zeppelin vinyl and listening to them exactly as God, or John Bonham – whichever deity you prefer – intended. Vinyl, , with its 20ish minute-a-side playing time, was perfect. Listen to half the album, get up, wander over to the turntable, turn the vinyl over, dust it off and enjoy the second half.

Of course, some of it comes down to the music makers. Many artists mistake their ‘best’ 8 to 12 songs as an album just because they cumulatively last about 40 minutes or so. And, thanks to the democratisation of music-production – now everyone with a PC/Mac has a music studio in their own home- the number of truly great albums is being diluted even further.

At the risk of sounding like a nerdy audio-ponce, I think the prevalence of cheap and nasty “hi-fi” equipment does not help the album’s cause either. Cheap hi-fi is fatiguing to listen to – after a short while you just end up with the feeling of wanting to turn the music off. Not conducive to extended listening. MP3’s with a huge percentage of the audio information removed exacerbate this problem.

However, maybe people would be more likely to buy the full album if they could get more than a 30 second preview of each track. How about a full one time listen through the entire album? I think too many albums only contain 1 or 2 decent tracks, leading to the cherry picking we see. This doesn’t help the few artists who genuinely are putting out whole albums of quality material.

Is this such a modern phenomenon? People have been shunning the second, third and fourth movements of Beethoven’s Symphony Number Five for a long time, yet I imagine he’d be horrified if he knew we weren’t listening to it in its entirely. There will always be a rift between the artist, and their fans (who feel the art should be fully experienced) and the general public (who want their pleasure finely distilled).

The article fails to mention the big rip-off that has taken place for the past 50 years. 9 in 10 albums or more are not complete artistic expressions of great musical visions but pure commercial outputs from contracts whereby artist are required to produce x number of albums within a given time frame. This is what gives all the forgettable filler material on most albums. Consumers of course have to pay for the crap as well. Now we’re getting back to old ways of buying music – song by song – or single by single. That is what you really want anyway. My hope is more great songs being released by the time the artist got inspired. It might be 3 great songs a year or nothing or 10. Income will probably go down with less content sold but then music can get back to the true value of music – playing it live to a paying audience.