The appeal of albums

Writing about soundtracks recently got me thinking about the ongoing appeal of albums.

I like the idea of a body of work, yet it seems as though successive technologies from the CD player's shuffle button to the iTunes business model have tried to make music into discrete tracks.

So I was interested in this observation from Geoff Barrow:
"It’s amazing to see just how many people are getting into the idea of listening to film scores, outside of just listening to a band’s album with 10 tracks. It’s because they want a new musical experience. It’s like reading a book, they want to be taken on a musical journey. It’s basically the modern classical. So where, in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s people used to buy classical records, and listen to whole suites on vinyl, people are now doing the same thing but with soundtracks and scores."


Humans make sense of information with narratives, so the ongoing appeal of albums as a body of work suggests to me they function as stories.