Limitless albums

In the previous post I confessed to preferring being able to listen to songs rather than full albums, and that got me thinking...

People lament the death of the album, but is that glorifying what the album was?

Music existed for millennia before it was recorded, and even after it reached the point of being set into the grooves of circular pieces of wax it remained a song-based artistic medium; the notion of an "album" as more than merely collecting the singles and being an artistic form unto itself, where there was some thematic unity from beginning to end, was something of a latecomer to the party.

Long Playing records could hold a certain amount of material per side, and so that imposed an artificial restriction on the art; one could not produce a track longer than would fit on a single LP side. (To have something longer required breaking it into a "part 1" and "part 2" scenario, but that's not a single track in my book.) Then cassettes had their limits, and then CDs that their limit (which grew as technology grew); the definition of an "album" as a collection of tracks packaged under a single title, marketed and toured in support of, has varied as the media on which they were manufactured changed. Now, with the tracks existing as digital files that are downloaded and then stored on a computer's hard drive or mp3 player's memory, the amount of time for the tracks on a single collection that is called an album is not really limited by the physical media; an artist could produce a single track that went on four literally hours, or a single "album" could contain thousands of tracks; the completely electronic medium would allow for that.

Obviously, the accompanying infrastructure may not be set for that; even with broadband internet speeds such a lengthy album could take a tremendous amount of time to complete, and then further it would take a lot of hard drive space (although that's becoming less of a concern). So, the limitation changes from the space on the physical media to the patience of the consumer; it's a matter of what we're willing to wait to finish downloading.

I doubt the three-minute pop song will ever disappear, because it holds a certain perfection for what a wide audience is interested in hearing (consciously or not), and with the proliferation of media that seek our attention it's less likely that immensely long pieces would catch on, regardless of how fast files can be transferred or how large the capacity of hard drives grow.

Wagner's Ring Cycle is technically longer than an audience could sit through, and in its entirety takes days to perform, and that didn't stop him from writing it. However, it's not as though that became the norm for symphonies or operas. (And if it had, one can only imagine how that would have progressed over the intervening century. When I get the program of events for the L.A. Philharmonic each year, it's not as though there's a single work that's so long that to perform it in its entirety takes an entire month. I'm not suggesting there's not such a work out there—I don't pretend to be an expert in experimental music, but I don't hear about that sort of thing as common.)

So, ultimately, the way we think about albums remains entrenched in the way that the delivery media has been over the past decades, but some day may merely be what serves as the cover art that's associated with a track when it's playing on our iPods (which, with advances in technology, may allow for holding tacks in a lossless format so there's no more lamenting how much better the music sounded on the LP).