feeling listless

Music The death of the album? The thrust of this piece is that the power of the album as an entity has been erroded through digital music because people have stopped listening to the thing as an experience spread over a hour or so and instead as single track entities. This process actually more than likely started with the skip button on a CD player -- if you don't like a track, unlike a LP or cassette where some messing about had to occur, you could just shift onto the next one instantly, to some extent loosening the cohesion of the experience. Some musicians agonise about the piece flows and probably think about pacing as much as film makers.

I'm as guilty of this as anyone else -- although Real One, my MP3 player of choice doesn't have a random facility as such, it's easy enough to put the tracks into alphabetical order then pick an inpoint at random. To be honest although I understand the argument put forward, what some artists are probably more worried about is the fact the slightly weaker tracks on the album which could be largely masked to some extent by the music around them, are left dangling, their flaws there for all to see. This is particularly true of pop -- the first Liberty X album has some very good strong tracks, the singles mostly, and a lot of filler. Now we can filter out the filler -- but really we shouldn't have to -- everything should stand up to scrutiny.