> I'm experiencing them together and in order, and that's a very different experience than interleaving songs.

I don't follow. You're free to listen to full albums, in sequence, on Spotify. You can listen to any song at any time in any order, from the album, or custom playlists. It's just a large catalog of music where you can click and play/queue anything you see, with some recommendation systems that create custom playlists you can choose to listen to.

I'm getting the impression that many people criticizing these streaming services don't understand what they actually are.