hi ryan, i like and agree with your point about albums being snapshots of artists' minds and that it's very important to take an album as one whole piece of art. i don't know a lot of other people who see things the same way way, so.. kudos to you!
I dont know whether you're actually writing reviews or RYm is messing with my mind and lying to me but I keep getting notifications about reviews from you but none of them get published you know :/
my reviews are mainly my ratings of things. sometimes i'll give a brief review of the album, but my plan is to do that later. right now i am just trying to rate the albums.
Interesting view on the 'sanctity' of albums as a form; in some genres (and during certain eras) though, particularly pop, I'd argue that singles are often actually the primary mode of expression, with albums being an afterthought.
I can see that, but why release a full album that's loaded with filler then? I guess the root of it would be money, and that would make the album commercial, where as the single would be their work, but that commercialism would compromise the album as a whole... catch 22 I guess, but there is a reason for all of those tracks...
I'd say that many artists only release album because it's required by the economics of the industry; I mean, consider that back around the turn of the millennium sales of physical singles were at an all-time low, whereas big-ticket artists like *Nsync were moving a million copies a week. Singles were still their primary focus in an artistic sense, but they had to be deployed as lures to make you bite on the whole record (and thus, get them paid). Now with digital sales being such a prominent part of the pie, the single has seen a renaissance. For example, far more people bought "Right Round" by Flo Rida than purchased the rest of his record because now you can just grab the tracks you like, rather than having to work through a whole album's worth of (possibly inferior, at the least different) material. This can impact artists who still like to compose on an album scale too, of course, so we'll see if there is a noticeable decline in the number/quality of albums versus that of "pure" (i.e. non-LP) singles. Whether this continues and we move to a relatively even split between singles and albums as the predominant release structures (a la the late '60s), or whether this is a fad, I don't know. Should be interesting though...
Thanks for the friend add, in any case.