It’s an easy – and lazy – conversation piece: the death of the album. Mix together alcohol, a pinch of nostalgia, phrases like “kids never being able to understand” and some oft-heard streaming stats – before you know it, you’re composing a misty-eyed eulogy. But it’s a conversation that’s factually incorrect.
Because, for every person spending their Sunday selling all their CDs online, there’s another flicking through vinyl at their local independent record store – or popping to Urban Outfitters to at least look like they’ve done that. While articles decry the lowest-ever selling album to top the US Billboard 200 (Drake’s Scorpion sold just 29,000 in its second week atop the chart in July), others chart the huge Twitter debate over the announcement of the Hyundai Mercury Prize shortlist.
For every person creating a “Summer 2018” playlist, there’s another who signed up to Tidal, just to consume Beyoncé and Jay Z’s Everything is Love. People are buying tickets to full-album gigs (such as Bloc Party’s upcoming Silent Alarm tour), joining online listening parties for Kanye West’s Wyoming sessions and practically salivating for an Arctic Monkeys album, without a pre-release single, about a 70s hotel in space. In other words, for every Chainsmokers’ album created to “shove all the singles in one place and flog it”, there’s a Blackstar, by David Bowie.
The album is still beloved and a national obsession. And arguably one of the main reasons for this is the Mercury Prize. It has shortlisted 12 British and Irish albums every year since 1992 – introducing music from a variety of musical genres to a wider audience.
Under Hyundai sponsorship since 2016, the prize seems more exciting than ever. The 2016 winner – Skepta’s Konnichiwa – enlisted a whole new group of fans to grime, while the 2017 winner, Sampha’s Process, a soulful meditation on the death of the singer’s mother to cancer, won plaudits for its affecting, understated arrangements.
Standout records such as these will get a further boost with the UK music industry inaugurating National Album Day on 13 October this year, to celebrate the LP format’s 70th year. The stats tell that story too. In 2017, 135m albums were either purchased, downloaded or streamed, a yearly rise of 9.5%– and 4.1m of these were on vinyl, the highest level since the start of the 90s. And more than half of those polled aged under 25 had listened to an album in the previous week (higher than those over 45).
In the first case, this bump is being fed by artists rededicated to the format. The album remains a powerful artistic statement, so much more than 12 songs shoved together.
There was a time when it seemed the forward-thinking move was to ditch albums. In 2007, the band Ash claimed they were done, saying: “The way people listen to music has changed, and with the advent of the download, the emphasis has reverted from albums to single tracks.” They’ve since released two albums (and a best of), admitting: “We’ve noticed just how much vinyl has come back and we thought this would be the best way of getting our music out there again.”
So why not just release playlists and mixtapes? There’s commercial incentive, as Ash touched on – but artistic ego and romance is also at play. Few epitaphs mention “that one banger someone made that one summer” – whereas a “great album” is purposeful, important and true. In promotion for National Album Day, Paloma Faith talks about being “vividly excited” by albums in her youth (nostalgia too is important), adding: “For me, the album remains the ultimate expression of the songwriter’s craft.”
It’s also about conveying emotion and artists getting to tell the story they want too. Played from 1-12, we understand Beyoncé’s Lemonade as a story arc of love, relationships and history that isn’t simply conveyed by hits like, Hold Up. It might not even be a personal story – observe 2018 concept releases by Janelle Monáe (Dirty Computer), Years & Years (Palo Santo) and Arctic Monkeys (Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino). Albums trump even social media in “telling your story”. As J Willgoose, Esq of the band Public Service Broadcasting says, promoting National Album Day: “We’ve tried to use the format to tell a story, which it’s extremely well suited to; using the emotional power of music and combining it with a narrative structure can make the listening experience so much more involving than a motley selection of one-offs.”
Ironically, for musicians who for generations have preached non-conformity, the “format” – including sleeves, sounds and smells – is also tied into the romanticism of albums. Ryan Adams recently told hmv.com he kept a record near him at all times when making new music and kept looking at it. “There’s something good about bending yourself to the sanctity of what a record is,” he said. “I think it’s more important than ever to remember that, because more and more people are forgetting. You’ll give your records to someone else one day and it’s important to be ritualistic.”
That “ritualistic” and physical quality is key to the other end of the equation – consumers matching artists’ renewed passion and actually buying these albums. Much of it on vinyl.
In fact, Jon Tolley of independent store, Banquet Records, says: “The increase in demand [for albums] was customer-led, not industry-driven. I’ve always thought the increase in vinyl sales is an immediate reaction to how disposable everything else is in the 2010s.
“As you have the world of music at your fingertips, the stuff you really love, that you want to have to hold forever, you want to have in a physical form. And some of that is outrageously extravagant.
“Vinyl itself is beautifully cumbersome and unnecessary. And that’s the beauty. Your record collection is an art collection, both aurally and physically.”
Stephen Godfroy, co-owner of Rough Trade, has seen a similar fetishisation in his customers: “The LP is the finest, truest aesthetic and informative representation of a recording artist’s work, given the breadth of ‘canvas’. Couple this with the burgeoning demand for authenticity as a counterpoint to the digitisation of experience and process, and you have a music format at the forefront of a post-digital era retailscape, where digital natives can now afford – thanks to the popularity of low-cost streaming subscription services – not just digital but also the antidote artefact itself.”
His latter point is key – there’s room (and money) in our lives for both streaming and albums – in fact, many of us listen and come to love digitally first. Ed Sheeran took over the whole “singles chart” with 16 “album tracks”, mostly through streaming. As Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy says: “Whenever the so-called experts say the album is dying as a format, I think: ‘Since when have we listened to so-called experts?’ Are video games killing chess as well?”
Not only is the album’s current status beloved by artist and consumers alike, the future is bright. An Official Charts spokesperson said they’re seeing a resurgence of albums thanks to motion picture cast recordings, such as The Greatest Showman – and even the “revival of the humble cassette”.
Katie Malcolmson, head of UK PR at music publicists Brixton Agency, adds: ‘‘There are a few labels out there reimagining the form a physical release can take – for instance, Alcopop! Records famously released a label compilation with a customised bike … We saw Björk surprise-drop and create an entire interactive VR digital exhibition around her album Vulnicura.
“These are artists who are reconceptualising what an album can be rather than doing away with it altogether. Boundary pushing artists will always try to break the mould, and if singles in playlists is the mould then I think we’ll see innovative artists defy that.”
You can shelve your album eulogies for now.
