Polls: Are Full-Length Music Albums Dead?

With a drastically changing music landscape and the influx of digital mediums for consuming music, the decline in full music albums has been steady. After last week’s poll in which we tackled the questions, “Is Print Dead?” this week’s poll focuses on the future of traditional full-length music albums. Early on during the digital music revolution with the inception of Napster and then later with the creation of Apple’s iTunes, it became more commonplace to simply download one or two of your favorite songs from an album to put on your iPod or in your digital media library. And while there exists numerous examples to cite (too many in fact for this concise writeup), it is worth noting artists such as the G.O.O.D. Music camp who have been able to sustain a following off the strength of single tracks that are steadily released as opposed to a comprehensive, full-length album. Adding further evidence for the theory that people are moving towards a single-song consumption mindset is the recent news that the individual track, “Mercy” went Platinum on its own with no other supporting tracks or full-length. And this is just one example.

With the likes of SoundCloud and the plethora of other single-track sharing and downloading sites abounding, it looks like the accessibility of songs are slowly but surely forcing the music industry to change and adapt the way in which it feeds listeners the songs they want. Do you think that the future of the music landscape will effectively do away with full-length albums in favor of single-tracks?

Looking back at our last poll in which we asked, “Is Print Dead?” the majority of people responded with “No,” which held 78.4% of the vote, while 21.6.5% stated “Yes.”