The record album continues to thrive in the streaming age

By D.B.

ON OCTOBER 12th record companies and music fans in Britain will celebrate the second annual National Album Day. Like all such events, it is a marketing wheeze, which raises the question of whether the album needs the help of such stunts to survive. After seven decades, beset by the rise of streaming, the decline of physical formats and the supremacy of the playlist, is the album finally fading into silence?

The theme of this year’s event is “Don’t Skip”, encouraging people to appreciate “the benefits of taking time out to listen to an album from start to finish”. Streaming does seem to have encouraged a more piecemeal approach to music consumption. A recent survey by Deezer, a streaming service, of 2,000 British adults found that 15% of respondents below the age of 25 had never listened to an album all the way through. The majority of listeners in that age bracket usually opted for playlists—ones curated by streaming services or that they had made themselves.

Yet given how often the album’s obituary has been written since the turn of the century, it is surprising that as many as 85% of younger listeners are persisting with them. More than a quarter (27%) of respondents overall said they like to play albums from beginning to end. Furthermore, these figures are specific to Britain, where the time spent listening to albums is two-thirds of the global average (that may explain why the country’s music industry has deemed it necessary to promote the activity). In America, according to BuzzAngle, a music analytics firm, album sales fell by 18.2% in 2018, yet total album consumption across all media rose by 16.2%. More albums are being listened to via streaming services, which in turn suggests that far from killing off the album, streaming may be contributing to its survival.

It is a testament to the durability of the album—less as a format, more as an idea—that it still matters to artists. Taylor Swift organises huge publicity campaigns to promote her albums, and leaves clues in her songs for fans to find. Drake, the most-streamed artist in the world, understands that albums are a means to monopolise listeners’ attention. Billie Eilish, a 17-year-old singer-songwriter, has built her career almost entirely online, with individual songs and EPs. But it is her debut album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?”, that has cemented her status as a superstar. Albums matter because artists believe they do, and because fans understand them to be signposts and declarations, whether they play the whole thing or not.

The album is still closely connected to touring, where much of an artist’s revenue is now generated. Deezer noticed a spike in album plays immediately before and after a musician’s live events. Albums give the artist something on which to centre the tour (which will often be named after it), and the tour a specific identity for the fans. Big-name acts such as Ariana Grande, Aurora, Marina, Foals and The 1975 have started to issue albums in episodic series, with new instalments arriving every few months, providing the basis for shorter, less exhaustive concert tours than the multi-year epics undertaken by many older stars.

The album has adapted itself to every cultural and commercial change it has encountered, and shows no sign of giving up now. During the album’s lifetime, previous forms of musical mass consumption have encouraged a pick-and-choose approach, including jukeboxes, radio, record-shop listening booths, mixtapes and iPods. It has been almost three decades since the CD overtook both vinyl and cassette as the most popular medium for listening to music—making it unprecedentedly easy to skip unwanted tracks—yet album sales kept rising for another decade still, peaking in the late 1990s.

Simply because people do not listen to the whole thing all of the time, it does not mean that the future of the album is in jeopardy. It is true that streaming has altered the nature of albums: it has made them longer on average, as more tracks generates more streams, more revenue and higher chart placings. It has not made the format obsolete.