Albums & Playlists

06-06-2026

The way music is distributed nowadays led to significant changes in how an artist's discography is structured. Previously, albums were usually listened to front to back, even if over the course of several days. Now, it's harder to find someone with a preference for listening albums in full, and instead, playlists take hold.

This isn't necessarily bad per se, but it leads to songs which are not connected to each other, and it's hard to find releases with a consistent thematic, a medley, or wildly different styles between albums, leading to a feeling of "stagnation" in a musician's career.

Album structures

Albums are an excellent opportunity for musicians to join together similar songs, or to build a story. This can be done in a number of ways:

Medleys

Still a favourite of mine, there are plenty of albums in which the songs can be "joined" together and they're made with transitions in mind. The best example to me is still "Abbey Road" (The Beatles), in which the album is masterfully divided in two sections, with "Here Comes the Sun" acting as a palate cleanser following "I Want You (She's So Heavy)". All songs intertwine and compliment each other perfectly.

This division is a "feature" of how albums used to be pressed, with two sides, and the listener having to turn the LP over halfway. This doesn't have to be done today anymore, but it led to bands working with this break instead of around it. It was still a feature of EDM albums in the CD era, with Orbital's self-titled "Orbital" being an excellent example.

Stories

An album could also have the songs interact by telling a story, best seen in "Welcome to the Black Parade" (My Chemical Romance), which starts with a two-song medley contrasting the dying moments of a man with a half-mocking follow-up that has a much happier undertone to it. This doesn't come from a technical restriction naturally, but it is a fantastic way of encouraging one to listen to the whole album while still allowing people to enjoy songs individually.

This is much harder to do right, and can often backfire if your songwriting skills aren't flexible enough. A good song should be able to have different meanings to different people, and should stand in isolation, something which Black Parade excels at, with each song being held in high regards as singles. The lyrics are subtle, retain the central theme of the album, while somehow allowing themselves to be investigated in isolation.

Experimentation

Albums also allow a band to have "clean breaks" between albums, enabling widely different themes, tempo, and general sound. Once again, Radiohead does this masterfully. "OK Computer" and "Kid A" are fundamentally different albums, with the second having a more electronic, fast-paced feel to it.

This is likely to be the hardest one to execute, as it's incredibly difficult to have band members with such wide-ranging sets of talents, and most importantly, navigating the fine line between losing one's identity and creating new sounds is massively difficult.

To avoid the latter, sometimes bands/artists release albums under different names, which although less impressive, allows them to retain a cleaner separation between musical identities.

Playlists

Playlists are not a "modern" phenomenon, likely starting with earlier MP3 players and CD burners. As disk sizes were limited, one had to pick a set of songs they enjoyed, skimming the "cream of the crop" of different albums by different artists, in likely different musical genres.

Nowadays, with streaming, this is no longer a problem, but the playlist habit remained, with algorithms bunching together songs with a similar feel and structure. Although this is great for casual listening, it leads to an incentive for artists to make songs which quickly hook one in, and deincentivises "building" songs for albums.

For instance, thanks to TikTok, artists make songs which maintain a consistent high-paced tempo so one could start listening at any point, with build-ups being left aside. This makes for uninteresting music, but quickly hook listeners in, and lends itself to being better background music for short-form content.

Much like a fast food restaurant, where all food tastes the same, owing to being generously salty and greasy, this type of music has no contrast, no interesting qualities, but it is addicting and draws you in. Same with a fast food restaurant, you can jump in and enjoy in a matter of seconds, and it appeals to a larger audience, much to the detriment of any structured experience the author may have thought of.

Some bands still retain at least one of the traditional album structures, like Car Seat Headrest with "The Scholars", which is story-based, or "Antidepressants" by Suede, which makes heavier use of samples and lo-fi sound compared to their earlier releases.

Naturally, this is hard. There is an audience for it, but music suffers from a snowball effect, where the lack of bands led to people in the mainstream losing interest in bands, bands having no incentive to form, and so on. Compound that with people not listening to full albums anymore, and there is a clear "preference" for single acts, which release singles instead of full albums.