You don’t love albums as a kid, you love songs, and you love them without fear or prejudice. You pay no mind to genre or taste, or whether a song is considered cool. Then somewhere along the way you start to understand that not everyone likes the same music as you. People and publications tell you why you shouldn’t like the music you like and why you should like this other music instead. You begin to doubt yourself. I may be projecting slightly there, but when you love music, it can be hard to escape the opinions of others, and the idea, explicitly stated or othwerwise, of a canon. Maybe some of us are more or less easily influenced, but none of us avoid it entirely, much as we like to think our own taste in music is pure and unsullied.

Up to the age of 12 I listened to songs rather than albums. I taped songs I liked off the radio, and listened to compilations from friends. The first music I bought with my own money from an actual music shop was a bunch of cassette singles. Where I did own albums, they were compilations of singles, like the Now! That’s What I Call Music series, or Erasure’s Pop! The first 20 Hits (I was going to make a snide comment about that being an optimistic title, but a quick search shows Erasure kept having hits a lot longer than I remembered).

This all changed when I joined the Britannia Music Club, a pivotal moment for any child. Even then I appreciated value for money (no suprise I grew up to be an accountant), so 5 albums of for £1 seemed too good to miss (although, as Homer Simpson pointed out, then they jack up the price). Even then, two of the albums I chose were compilations of dance hits and two were albums by artists where I only really liked the singles. The final choice, because I needed to fill out my selection and there wasn’t anything else I particularly fancied, was Nevermind by some band called Nirvana.

Nevermind, as I have written about before, was the first album I truly loved. The first one I appreciated as an album and listened to repeatedly, in full. It was the first time I was a fan of a band rather than just their song(s). I supported them like a football team, blindly, accepting no criticism. Of course I didn’t love all bands this way, and there were plenty where I was happy buying a single instead of an album, or indeed their entire discography.

Over time, my music buying and listening became more heavily album based. This was for a number of reasons. Economic reasons (albums became cheaper. Why buy a load of singles when I could get all of the Pixies albums for £20, or go into Fopp and buy a whole load of classic albums for £5 each). Practical reasons (It was easier to stick an album on than to keep getting up and changing the CD single. Industry reasons (the bottom dropped out of the CD singles market and they were not as heavily sold or promoted).

I eventually disposed of most of my singles, whilst my album collection kept expanding, probably close to 1000 at its peak. From my early twenties I only really listened to albums, and when I say I listened to them, I mean in full. I did not skip tracks. I remember talking to some friends once about OK Computer and being vaguely horrified that they all said they always skipped ‘Fitter, Happier’. I admit it’s not a song I would typically listen to on its own, but it works in the context of the album, and honestly it had never occured to me to skip it. The only exception to my no-skip rule was ‘Sloop John B’ on Pet Sounds due to my strong belief it doesn’t really belong on that album.

Another influence on my listening habits was the cultural idea that albums were more serious than singles, that if you were a sophisticated musician or listener, that meant being album orientated. That idea was pervasive, but it hadn’t always been that way. In the early days of rock music, albums were collections of singles padded out with some filler tracks to wring a little extra money out of customers. It was only really in the mid to late 60s that (some) artists began to think of albums as a coherent body of work in their own right, possibly with a theme, or even a story running right through. These types of album were taken more seriously by music critics, perhaps because it’s easier to write about an album with a concept or theme or story than one that is just a bunch of songs.

Bands who wanted to be taken seriously, or took themselves too seriously, began to focus on albums above singles. The likes of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd eschewed releasing singles altogether, in some cases permanently. Even many years later when I became interested in music, discussion of which bands where the greatest of all time were very focused on albums above singles, to the benefit of white guys with guitars from the Sixties and Seventies and the detriment of artists from genres which were less album focused. Soul, disco, hip-hop, even punk to a degree. To be called an albums artist was generally a compliment, whilst to be called a singles artist was vaguely derogatory. Sure, you may have written and performed dozens of hits beloved by people the world over, but somehow that’s not as impressive as having a dozen less popular but vaguely related songs strung together.

The thing is, although albums can be beautiful, coherent pieces of work, more often they are not. Of the 1000 albums I owned, there were maybe 100 that I listened to with any regularity and probably half I never listened to at all after the first five times (I used to have the idea that you couldn’t judge an album until you had listened to it five times, which may have had a kernel of truth, but the number of hidden gems I uncovered through repeated listens was dwarfed by the amount of time I spent listening to bad or mediocre music). Many albums were, and are still, some singles with a load of filler. Many others attempted to be something more but failed. For every album I loved deeply there were 10 on a spectrum that ran from fine to terrible..

Still, album listening remained my default. This was true even after Ipods and streaming services came along, removing some of the practical reasons for buying and listening to albums. There were a lot of articles about how streaming would mean the death of the album, and really it should have been. The dominance and form of albums were driven by commercial and practical considerations. Albums tended to max out at 45 minutes when that was what a vinyl record would hold, and bloated to 80 when CDs became dominant. Now artists could release music in whatever quantities they wished, at whatever intervals they liked. But albums still seem to dominate the promotional cycles of the biggest stars, and the music discourse. If anything streaming feels like it has changed songs (shorter, hooks up front) more than albums. Although what an album actually is has changed, with tracks being added and remixed, expanded versions coming out at a dizzying rate and occasionally even songs still being worked on after release (hello Kanye).

Amongst many listeners, primarily but not entirely the younger ones, there’s a pushback against the streaming-led ‘death of the album’. The number of gigs where artists play a classic album in full is ever increasing. There are listening parties where people gather and listen to full albums in silence. The resurgence of vinyl albums continues apace. What an album is may have become more nebulous, but the death of the album has been greatly exaggerated.

But maybe not for me. Over the last few years the proportion of my music listening time spent listening to albums has singificantly decreased. Whilst there are many ethical, practical and financial issues with streaming services, I have found that I love putting playlists together. I have playlists of my favourite songs from particular years, and my favourite songs from particular countries. I have genre playlists, and playlists with obscure themes like ‘creatures of the air’. I even have playlists of my favourite songs by particular artists. I would at one time have considered it heresy to listen a playlist of just my favourite Nirvana songs rather than listen to one of their albums, but now I quite like it. When Alan Partridge said his favourite Beatles album was ‘The Best Of The Beatles’ it was to indicate he was naff, unserious, not a ‘real’ music fan, but now I think he may have been on to something.

Don’t get me wrong, I still listen to and buy albums, in both digital and physical form, many of which I love a great deal. When I want to investigate a new or old artist I haven’t heard before, I still default to checking out one or more of their albums rather than one of the ‘spotlight on’ type playlists on my streaming service. But I also spend as much, if not more, time listening to individual playlists and songs.

My own past insistence on listening to albums in full, and enough times to give them a fair go, sometimes made listening to music a chore where it should be a joy. This is of course not the fault of the album itself, but when listening to a truly great song, the joy is always there, and I’m glad that I now spend more time doing that. Whilst the album may not be dead, the idea that is the best, most correct way to consume music might just be dying, and I can’t say that is a bad thing.