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Comment by kokowawa393 | Hacker News Reader

I guess the album is dead

Not at all true, many of the new rap scene has some very cohesive albums. Brockhampton saturation 1-3 have very clear beginning and ends, JPEGMAFIA's new album is a clean 42 minute experience. The album is not dead. Its just the audience listening to it

Edit: This expands past these two bands, I'm giving two small examples in a large field that I listen to. I think artists are leaning toward either singles that get tons of airplay or albums that get listen time drawn out because the album is cohesive. Its two different styles of listening,and both are being catered. You can have a one off single that one group of people love, and another group that can't listen to that single outside of the album. Streaming services have done a good job at allowing this to happen.

Major label guy here. Not quite. While this isn’t as important for a lot of artists, on the top (like megastar-level: Drake, Post Malone, etc.), it’s still a huge money maker. More tracks means more streams which means more revenue. The waterfall is effective, but the album is still important. Especially in the release week.

What about cohesion in the album? I guess that prog-rock/indie/hiphop themed albums thing isn't very common in general these days, I'd be surprised to see one today from any new artist.

The intros and skits would never fit into streaming properly, especially with the ranking algorithms. Nothing worse than getting some random intro skit come up on a recommended playlist!

Spotify should run some detection algorithms on songs to not recommend the intros/skits, or the uploader can explicitly mark them for exclusion, which would help boost their singles and not push unhelpful songs

I'm a big fan of artists releasing each song as it's made, with each having cover art and maybe a backup song. They . can still package them up in a full album for charting and full album sales.

Spotify uses peoples manual playlists to drive some recommendations. If two songs are on a playlist together they’re probably similar. In the same way, if a song isn’t on any playlists, like you’d expect a skit not to be, then they don’t recommend it.

Free human curation of stuff that goes well on playlists.

Perhaps, but I still think we're a long way away from, say, something like "Dark Side of the Moon" being a viable approach anymore. I don't miss albums so much as cohesive, long-form genuinely artistic statements... (Fancy way of saying concept albums).

Only if you listen to Top 50. The metal world is still going strong with album oriented albums

Metal and rock both put out some great albums still. And I still look forward to those releases to just experience half an hour of (mostly) new content all at once.

OTOH, Taylor Swift also just released a new album. So there's definitely still albums being made in the "top 50" as well.

With pop music, it arguably has been for some time.

Could we see much longer album-esque songs in the future?

AFAIK all streaming services pay per play (of more than 30s). So no, they incentivise the exact opposite of "longer album-esque songs". A single 30mn song would earn the same as a 2:30 song, and would be unlikely to have the early catchy hook which ensures it passes the 30s mark for a payout.

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