Blog 7: We have been cheated out of the album experience

I feel like Generation Z kids were cheated out of the experience of buying an album and listening to it all the way through. I didn't even know what an album was growing up, because I always got music as singles on the radio, or on my iPod. The way I got my music when I was young was typically radio, and then Spotify and Apple Music later on. But music was not offered to me in the form of an album, it was always singles. So I just went along my life listening to singles, and when I figured out entire albums existed I would rarely listen to the whole album because I had already listened to all the singles off that album, which were usually the better songs, so I didn't want to have to take the time to listen to songs that may or may not be as good as the singles. I know that sounds silly but I suppose that's how my music listening habits developed due to my childhood. Only recently I have been listening to entire albums and I really like that form of listening better. It is so fun to wait up until your favorite artist drops the album and sit down and listen to it the whole way through. You get to see how the album flows and it is like a story, almost. I gain a better understanding and appreciation for the artist and for each individual song.

I know you can still listen to albums all the way through, but with streaming bases like Spotify and Soundcloud and Apple Music, it kind of feels like there are all these distractions around you. We are a much more playlist oriented generation, making playlists of all the best singles and compiling them together. I feel like the way that Spotify is set up makes it less likely for mew to listen to entire albums. It is a very playlist-heavy platform. I COULD get a record player and do the whole record thing but that a) costs money and b) seems kind of phony now because you're spending all this money to be retro. However, my roommate has a record player and collects records, and if you get a good speaker system, the album sounds way better. It's more of an experience with a record player rather than just pressing play on a song. So anyway, all of this is bringing me to my last point. I have all of these artists who I love, but growing up I never listened to their albums because I was just listening to their radio singles. So now I have to go back and listen to literally every artist ever and listen to all their albums. I feel like you can't really talk about or judge an artists if you don't listen to all of their music or at least a good portion of it. I am excited to find some hidden gems, but also this is going to be a long journey. I am making a list of all of these albums I need to listen to and I already have 20 albums on my list and those are just recent albums from a specific genre of music I like. I am going to be doing a lot of listening folks!