It is dying. I do enjoy it still but not all of the time.

I always listen to studio albums all the way through; if it's a live album or a compilation (either an official one or one I made) I may skip around. I believe that's the way they're meant to be listened to, although my girlfriend (who's 7 years younger than me) and her teenage daughter don't agree. They say I'm a fossil, I tell them they have the attention spans of a nat, lol.

I admit that I have to have a playlist in a certain order, you cant just have songs randomly slapped together, If its a greatest hits type of playlist, It must be in order from the artist first recording and finish on their last. Example my Beatles playlist on my ipod begins with Love Me Do and finishes with Get Back. You can argue that Get Back was not their last song but it is the last song on their last album.

+1 dinosaur who always listens to albums all the way through ...
although i made my own EP out of the "new/old" material from the Exile re-issue

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lapaz62
I admit that I have to have a playlist in a certain order, you cant just have songs randomly slapped together, If its a greatest hits type of playlist, It must be in order from the artist first recording and finish on their last. Example my Beatles playlist on my ipod begins with Love Me Do and finishes with Get Back. You can argue that Get Back was not their last song but it is the last song on their last album.

No 'Real Love' then?

No real love for Real Love!

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Rip This
...no seriously...who skips any somgs on Some Girls?...really??

I just skip the whole album.

I only put the songs that I like, so Real Love can get on Free as a Bird and fly away, there is a reson that some songs never make an album cut.

You are talkin about perfect albums! OK every Stones-album on Decca, every Beatles Album and Bob Dylans and look out for Bowies Low-Heroes-Lodger...

...and maybe 500 more...

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His Majesty

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Rip This
...no seriously...who skips any somgs on Some Girls?...really??

I just skip the whole album.

I sometimes skip Far Away Eyes, when I'm not in the mood for a country ballad palette cleanser.

At some point in the early 90s there was a trend for albums to be extended to 70-80 mins in length. I don't think that many people have a capability for staying focussed so long. Albums should be 40-45 mins in length, max. It leaves you wanting more.

Intressting! I'm prepared to start collecting LPs with a play-length of 70-80 minutes any day. Any suggestions?

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I have to say that I really started listening albums all the way through only since I have them on CD.

Before, there always was a favorite side. Tattoo You is the best example. My LP has side one worn to pieces, and side two mint! (In my teens I didn't appreciate the softer side of the stones and I used to hate Jagger's falsetto ...)

C

I nearly always listen to the entire album, and avoid skipping tracks - even live recordings, which is over 2 hours in lenght
Hearing 'parts of' an album is like closing the book, before getting through the chapter, I think

This is why I prefer the LP format to CD. It takes a bit of effort to get the vinyl out , give it a wipe, cue it on the turntable. Then you can sit down, relax , look at the sleeve and listen to the LP all the way through. You even get a bit of exercise getting up to change the record over to side 2.

I must admit that I only have vinyl copies of albums that I really love to listen to all the way through so anything with a lot of duff tracks is mp3 only on my itunes library.

With CD it's too easy to skip over tracks and not really give the music your full attention.

Andy

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PhilipRBowl
any beatles album

Interesting, although the white album and Abbey Road are my favorite beatle albums I cannot sit through Revolution #9 or Octopus Garden.

To be fair there are very few albums I will listen straight through Exile, Some Girls, London Calling and maybe a few more.

Old timers will recall getting up to flip the album over which, often as not, meant putting on a DIFFERENT record rather than continuing to listen to the same one. Given that LPs only ran 35-45 minutes, you were only listening to, perhaps, 20 minutes of an album. Moreover, LP sides were sequenced to be a good listen in their own right. These days, with CDs, all the good stuff is frontloaded in the first 20-25 minutes followed by another 20 minutes of so-so material and finishing up with pure dreck. Doesn't matter as most folks are just downloading the songs they like anyway.

London Calling bores me to pieces and I'm suppose to be a Clash-fan...



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Wandering spirit - all the way through - perfectly sequenced unlike some Stones albums IMO.............

I recall having a favourite side for many of my old LP's. When you finally came to flip them over and play them they often sounded horrible as years of dirt had accumulated in the grooves and not been scrapped out by the stylus.

Some LP's had definite themes for the different sides. Side 2 of Tattoo You was a regular for early hours of the morning when everyone was a little mellower, I'd never dream of putting side 1 on then.

It's true that nowadays the pressure to get a CD out often results in a couple good songs that will be released as singles to get airplay, while the rest of the songs is of lesser quality.

I also believe this is somehow related to the "second album syndrom" which causes a lot of acts to collapse. The first album is often made of songs written over a few years time, which have been played and mellowed on stage. For the second album, bands have to write songs in a few months time, with far more pressure, and also very little chance to play the songs live.

All Pink FLoyd albums

Its definately is a dying thing.
Whoopi Goldberg made a good point about this on a recent "The View".....
don't know what brought it up, but there were arguing the merits of downloading tunes to listening to an entire cd.....
the younger hosts made the same argument about "why should I buy a whole cd when I only like one song...' etc...
But Whoopi said that listening to albums was a way to really listen to an artists' work.....
that point went over their heads...
Its generational.

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gwen

LP sides would be 15 to 20 minutes when CDs nowadays last at 45, sometimes up to 90... It's understandable people get bored.

Even in the CD days I was changing CDs after two songs, sometimes even in the middle of the first one. For instance I was a big fan of LZ Celebration solo and would be playing the song until the solo and then change the CD...

Nowadays, most of the time I listen to my digital library (ripped from my CD collection). More than 19 days in total, usually playing in random, which helps discover or remind of obscure or forgotten pearls. Even in this mode I do skip a lot of songs.

I agree the shuffle feature is a bit of a spoiler when artists and mastering engineers spend days deciding of the tracks order, and working on transitions...

But when I feel like really listening to music (and not background music), I play CDs or LPs and in this case, in the right order and for the whole album.

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ab
The LP side is the perfect listening unit: 15-25 minutes, get up and change the record.

Then CDs came along with, first 74, then 80, minutes of music. They're just too long. Because CDs cost so much, people felt the need to provide max music. Trouble is, that just led to poor editing and inclusion of songs that would have been b-sides on the albums proper.

I end up listening to a lot of albums all the way through just because a lot of my listening is in my car or office.

I think the essential is nailed in these two posts.

An album as an artistic unit died with the invention of CD format. What happened after that, since the digitality really took off, was a natural progress set by the CD format.

First of all, it took the physical part of the product to minimum. With LPs you needed to work to skip the track - in fact, one needed to have developed certain skills to do that properly, and not just push the remote-control button. The music needed to be reached, you need to concentrate - have time - to the very thing. The music was respected more since it was not so easy to reach. And when you respect, you mentally are repaired/oriented differently.

Secondly, the album cover was a big part of the listening experience. That belonged to the very concept of album. What a joy it was to sit down and 'study' the cover while listening to the record. It gave a certain flavor. The artists knew this aspect of that and really work hard to invent new kinds of covers. It was not any stupid, awful, easily broken small plastic crap package with cheap paper in it, and pictures and texts that needed to be study with some goddamn microscope - no joy no more!

Thirdly, the biggest artist failure happened when the side of 15-25 minutes side was destroyed in favour of 70-80 minutes of constant run (this is very well put in those quoted posts). The artists/producers didn't any more think the albums in terms of these dramatical stories of 15-25 minutes (with all of them having a start, the middle, the end, etc.), but just an endless run of songs one after one. This would lead to the idea that the artistic wholeness didn't really matter any longer. It was just the individual songs to be picked up/chosen from. Now the albums were having some 'extra' material since there was space for 'special gifts'. The quantity over quality. Just add few cuts more more to the end. Back in the 70's the idea of adding some second-rate material would have been unthinkable - it would have killed the artistic drama of the album. The result is that nowadays one listens the album perhaps once all the way through to get some idea of the individual songs, and then just picks up the ones feels like listening to, etc.

I could go on.

I sometimes think how the CD-era fans really can 'grasp' the point of LP-era albums - how they were constructed to certain artistic packages. Think of the four sides of EXILE ON MAIN STREET; the b-side of TATTOO YOU, etc. "El Mocambo-side" of LOVE YOU LIVE, If you lived in that world it was just not thinking theoretically that "okay, after "Tumblin Dice" I wait few seconds until "Sweet Virginia" begins". No, you needed to move your ass to the record player, and turn the record with your very hands - while you do that you mentally forget the stuff you just heard and are repairing to get a new chapter to begin to tell its unique story ("the side of no screaming rocker in it" - you remember the artist said?)

The Rolling Stones has always been a mirror of the record industry, starting from a singles band, and were very influential in creating the album-era, Once again, their records very well also represent the change from vinyl to CD. STEEL WHEELS seemed to be the last album they thought in terms of LP. VOODOO LOUNGE is a pure representatative of the CD-era - really shapless compilation of goddamn many songs (it is unthinkable to try to discover the thrilling story of four exciting chapter s of like, say, EXILE from there, even though there is material enough for that). The very idea of 'album' changed during that time lap.

Ugh.

- Doxa



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 2011-06-14 14:12 by Doxa.

I listen to full albums a lot. But having copied all albums and bootlegs to my hard-disk, I must
say it has some very entertaining results to play all songs in a random order. It can come as
a very nice surprise to have Sweet Black Angel playing right after Hey Negrita, for example.
Having heard those songs in the same order for over a 30 years, listening to complete albums
becomes as natural as breathing (and I mean that's a good thing). But it is a challenging experience
to have a sudden breath of nitrous oxide when you expect the next bit of fresh air. Very rewarding!

Just as long as the guitar plays, let it steal your heart away