I don't get why people are still buying and listening to whole albums.
10 years into the digital music era (Napster -> iTunes/eMusic for me)
I now only get individual tracks. And even in cases where I own and
have ripped a CD to iTunes I only select a couple of songs to go onto
my iPod.
The album concept is totally arbitrary. Why would we think that the
creativity of the human mind functions in such a way that all
musicians create coherent works that are 10-12 songs. It's an
artificial construct of the record industry. It's design is to make
people spend more than they did in the previous era defined by the
record single.
Musicians create songs. Left to their own devices and without a
record company or a music industry (manufacture, distribution,
promotion, etc.) they would not make albums. They would just make a
song and when it was done they would play it. Just like people did
for 99.9999% of human history, before the recording industry invented
the LP album format.
In fact when musicians do create large coherent works that are really
meant to be heard as one long session, those are longer than regular
albums. For example concept albums like The Wall or Quadrophenia, or
classical works (created before the album existed).
Maybe I am the outlier here, but there is plenty of good music
available from a wide variety of artists. Why listen to the 12th best
song on one CD, which you know the artist included to fill the space,
when you could instead listen to the best song by another artist? To
me that's like eating a large bowl of pasta when instead you could try
12 different tapas.
