> Forcing artists to pump out strings of singles and EPs
But who is forcing the artists? The market? It's clear people don't want to listen to LPs released every 3-4 years, they want singles and EPs released frequently. If it is indeed a market effect, then artists need to evolve or perish. If you want to make money selling art, you need to make it in a way that people want to buy it. It's that simple.
This is just the death of another art form.
One of the things that happens when consumers have options they didn't before is previously invisible preferences become expressible. What if the bulk of consumers never cared much about albums as coherent pieces of art? What if they only did so financially because it was the only way to get the separable pieces they did care about?
The advent of fast food has not exterminated fine dining. What's changed is that consumers have more choices. This did not signal the death of fine dining.
Music in the current age is equal parts pop culture as it is listening aesthetics. For an artist to thrive financially they have long had to take the first path rather than primarily focus on the later.
The artists all producing the top songs on spotify are doing so through the release of singles here and there and it makes total sense given the cultural context for how music is consumed and discovered in the current year.
But even amongst that music, you can still find some albums, being produced as such, with the intention of it being an album. It's harder to find and I doubt it makes money through services like Spotify, but on places like bandcamp, or independent label storefronts you can find plenty of albums in a wide variety of genres.
The best thing we can do is support those artists and keep buying that music if that's what we want. As long as there's a market for it, it can keep existing despite Spotify.
Then there's the recording and engineering challenges around mixing and mastering an album. Albums need to sound cohesive even if the songs aren't necessarily the same genre even. The best albums are those ones that flow between softer or more upbeat music but still feel tied together as a whole.
Forcing artists to pump out strings of singles and EPs diminishes music as an artform. It takes away the format that's allowed some of the best modern music to be created that likely would never have been created if artists were just constantly pumping out individual disconnected songs.
Even today, you can still find some pretty amazing albums that are being made where each song individually would stand as less, but together as an album they come together to make some great art.