The traditional format of an album as a group of songs released at the same time all together was formalized with the invention of the record which was standardized to have a runtime of around 40 minutes (20 minutes per side) with the vinyl record of the 1950s. The length of albums then was largely a result of commercial forces and not an unspoken rule devised by artists. A cursory search of Spotify for any album made in this time will reveal the rather strict time limitation of 40 minutes which seems relatively short compared to many of the drawn-out albums released today. Despite changes in musical storage technology starting with the CD and the cassette tape in the 60s and 70s, the album structure was maintained. Albums, however, could now utilize the extra hardware space to increase their length with CDs allowing for a runtime of around 80 minutes. Fast forward to the present day where music streaming services rule supreme and the album has still found a way to stick around. Though artists are offered the choice to release music instantaneously and with zero production costs, they still choose to periodically drop collections of songs with possibly one or two singles acting as precursors to the main album. There are multiple reasons for this such as a need to have enough musical material to make a physical copy (for the record purists and superfans) to increase revenue and the fact that albums effectively organize a discography for artistic reasons as well as marketability.
While the album length might have started out as a byproduct of technological and commercial limitations, this does not mean that the structure of an album cannot have artistic meaning imbued into it. Inherently, albums break up an artist’s discography into definable categories. While not always the case, as artists tend to change and evolve over the years, having albums oftentimes mark distinct stylistic periods (or eras) in an artist’s musical career. In this case, the album usefulness lies in organizational benefits. However, the album can also be viewed as an almost distinct artist medium unto itself. This occurs when the songs individually tell a larger narrative across the album’s runtime. In short, the sum of the parts becomes greater than the whole. Thus, the album has developed to be a container through which songs can work together to relay an artistic experience in a similar way that movies are container through which scenes work together. An album conceived to accomplish this goal is elevated to more than just a collection of songs because the songs build off of each other and weave context together making the messages and musicality more potent than if they had been released individually. Perhaps the simplest example of this can be found in the cast recordings of musicals. Obviously, the musical is designed to include visual and auditory elements but many people listen to the music on its own. In a musical album, for example Hamilton, the songs are all in service of a larger narrative allowing them to work as a cohesive unit and greatly enhance the drama and meaning in the songs. While musical albums are an extreme example of this because they oftentimes sacrifice musical elements in favor of a clear story, albums of other genres are capable of achieving similar results. To do this, however, requires lots of planning and foresight and most importantly, the artist must have some artistic meaning to express.
There exists a question as to the value or quality added by making an album that is coherent and unified in expressing a focused message. In other words, is a folk album that is carefully plotted to tell an emotional journey automatically worse than an experimental synthpop album which has little message or meaning behind it and is focused on exploring the technical limits of sound? The question is complicated further by the fact that many musicians today simply do not care enough to attempt to craft an album which utilizes the format instead merely dropping whatever tracks they have written onto a project and calling it an album. I am not saying this is a bad thing but only that it is a thing that does happen. It is also common today to see artists drop many different versions of the album (such as deluxe, acoustic, club remix, etc.) oftentimes in an attempt to get more plays and revenue. Once again, this is not necessarily a bad thing but many times, it demonstrates a lack of care and attention to using the album structure itself as part of the artistry. In my mind, an analogous scenario to many albums which are churned out today is if a film studio released a movie that was made up of 5 or so short films, each great in their own right, but still not adding up to a whole movie. I might like many of the songs on your album, but listening to the album does not add anything more than listening to each of the songs individually. A change of terminology might be needed and would likely be appreciated by the artists who do not care to utilize the album format in an artistic way. What we need is a term that still organizes songs together, but does not imply any meaning in their grouping. A word for a collection of songs which can be played individually, forwards, backwards, mixed up, etc. without any other associations that come with the term album. This new term would not only remove any expectations from projects which only have a few good singles and are largely incoherent as well as giving people an incentive to begin to listen to entire albums because they know that they have been intentionally designed to be one contained listening experience.