| It’s interesting that the album-as-form should have fallen by the ideological wayside, given recent developments in music listening: first, the CD eliminates the need to turn over the album or tape, making it theoretically easier to let an album roll from beginning to end; second, CD readout leads people to start referring to songs by their numbers in sequence rather than by their titles, presumably resulting in at least a slight rise in the listening audience’s awareness of how song sequences work; third, the single dies an almost total death in the U.S., with people reasoning vis-à-vis the record labels’ having raised their prices again, and again, and again: “Hey, if you’re going to gouge me ten bucks for a lousy single, I might as well bend all the way over and shell out the eighteen bucks you want for the album.” |
