I'm not listening to full albums anymore

In the last few years, I’ve lost my appetite for discovering new music. The main reason is that I’ve focused on listening to full albums for most of the last decade, but increasingly I find it irritating and anxiety-inducing to listen to albums from start to finish.

I’ve been reading/watching music reviews online since my early twenties. In this time, I’ve also been part of a number of music communities online. One defining characteristic of music discussions online—at least in the Anglophone world—is that they’re centered entirely around the album.

To most critics and “serious” music fans, the album seems to be a single, indivisible unit of music that must always be considered as a whole. Five minutes with a search engine will dredge up hundreds of blog posts and op-eds touting the benefits of listening to complete albums rather than individual tracks. Some people almost attach morality to the act of listening to an album. If you’re not listening to full albums from start to end, in a darkened room, with your eyes closed, with noise-cancelling headphones, then do you even respect the music? Are you even a true fan?

In my mid-twenties, I wanted to be a musician (I still do, but not as intensely). So when I started taking music more seriously myself, I focused my listening mainly on albums. This wouldn’t have been such a terrible thing had it not been for the fact that I didn’t enjoy listening to full albums. At all. Never had, never will.

I grew up in an era of cassette tapes. When I was a teenager, my parents would take me to the local Planet M once a month, where I would be allowed to buy exactly one album on tape. My family couldn’t afford CDs because CDs cost ₹400-500, whereas cassette tapes cost ₹100-150. So even when most of the world had moved on to CDs, I was still listening to all my music on tape.

When you’re listening to albums on tape, you’re not really skipping around the tracklist. Sure, it’s possible to skip tracks on a cassette tape. That’s what the rewind and fast-forward buttons are for. But it’s not easy. You have to know precisely how long to rewind and/or fast-forward so you land where you want to. If you don’t get it right the first time, it becomes a frustrating back-and-forth dance between the rewind and fast-forward buttons until you manage to find the exact spot you need to be. Kind of like parallel parking in a tight spot.

Listening to most of my music on tape, I should’ve grown up to be the sort of adult who enjoys listening to albums, right? But that’s not what happened. The moment I discovered I could record my favorite tracks from their original tapes onto blanks, I stopped listening to full albums altogether. I had discovered the joys of making mixtapes, and there was no going back.

When my family finally bought a computer, and I discovered how to download MP3s from the internet, I completely gave up on listening to full albums or even downloading them illegally. Freed from the constraints of linear analog media, I began collecting individual MP3s, making playlists, and curating music for myself.

This changed in my twenties. As I started participating in music communities, going to gigs and festivals, and running a music blog, I also started forcing myself to listen to albums. That’s how all the pros did it, after all, and didn’t I want to be a pro?

However, even when I was listening to nearly a hundred new albums each year, they didn’t quite make sense to me. They still don’t. To me, they just seem like a convenient packaging for a collection of music. Outside of some loose themes and sonic similarities that hold an album together, I don’t see why a certain set of tracks placed in a certain sequence makes for a better listening experience than a slightly altered set of tracks in a slightly altered sequence.

There’s a lot of talk about the artistic intent that goes into curating and sequencing an album. But when artists play their music live, they often curate setlists by mixing and matching tracks from several different albums. DJs go even further, curating their mixes from tracks by many different artists, genres, and eras. If musicians themselves don’t constrain themselves to the album format, why must I?

Sure, there are some artists who have turned the album into an art form. There are albums out there that are designed to be one unified, cohesive experience. But those albums are exceedingly rare. I’m willing to bet less than one in a hundred albums is designed to be listened to as a unit. Most albums are just collections of tracks that an artist made in a certain time period, or which share a common theme or sound.

Albums also seem to me a modern invention, one that came about because of the technical limitations of recording media rather than a human tendency for enjoying a certain amount of music at a time. An LP is about 40-50 minutes long, not because that’s a magic number but because that’s how much music a vinyl record can hold. That’s why so many rock albums are still around 45-50 minutes long to this day. Rock music rose to prominence in the heyday of the vinyl record. On the other hand, hip-hop rose to prominence around the time audio CDs became more common, which is why many rap albums are a bit longer at around 60-70 minutes. The length of an album has little to do with something inherent in the genre or user preferences and everything to do with the technical limitations of the media it’s distributed on.

And now that streaming music has become more common, we see many artists breaking the mold. Some artists release albums that last several hours, while others only ever release singles. Unless an artist is planning to release physical versions of their music, they’re no longer constrained to the album format.

So after more than a decade of forcing myself to listen to albums, I too am releasing myself from the constraint of album-centric listening. Starting this year, I’m going to listen to music in the way I enjoy: by seeking out individual tracks that move me, and arranging them into curated playlists for myself and my friends.

To discover new music, I’m listening to more singles, curated playlists, and radio stations. I’m reading Bandcamp editorials and diving deep into obscure tags. I’m allowing myself to open an artist’s Spotify page and click around on whatever tracks catch my fancy. I’m even allowing myself to listen to albums on shuffle, something I’ve already done with Audrey Hobert’s Who’s the Clown over this last week.

I’m hoping that by freeing myself to listen to music in the way I want will allow me to discover a lot more this year.