- If anyone should be ditching the format, it's young, Internet-native musicians like Tyler, the Creator and Kendrick Lamar. Why do so many artists stick by it in the streaming age?
Saying that the album is dead strikes me as stupid. Why would it die just because you can easily release singles now? I'm sure fewer artists will feel obligated to make albums, but then some other artists will want to make a more substantial statement/several songs which have a similar sound/songs recorded in the same session. Why not group them together?
The sentiment at the end of the article makes sense to me. My uneducated guess would be that for pop music that's meant for radio/youtube/movies, releasing albums will make less and less sense. For "artists" like a lot of rappers and independent bands, there's an "elemental appeal" to the album format, that'll probably be around for a long time. Especially so because that's where monetization has traditionally been. Once there are more iron-clad ways to monetize from youtube, spotify, and soundcloud, I would guess that more musicians will release one-offs or smaller groups of songs.Logistically and promotionally, batch-releasing makes sense. But part of it might be the elemental appeal of the format.