Hannah Ellis-Petersen 

Album spins closer towards its final track as a viable format

Sales continue to fall and streamed playlists dominate. But like vinyl, talk of LP's extinction may be premature
  
  

Vinyl record
Vinyl may have survived the CD onslaught, but many in the music industry believe digital playlists spell the end of the album. Photograph: Anton Starikov/Alamy Photograph: Anton Starikov / Alamy/Alamy

"Make no mistake," declared George Ergatoudis, head of music at BBC Radio 1 and Radio 1Xtra, this month. "With very few exceptions, albums are edging closer to extinction."

It was enough for musicians and fans alike to take to social media in their droves to jump to the defence of a format that has dominated the music industry for half a century.

Yet Ergatoudis has the facts on his side. The statistics for album sales and revenue from online streaming services show consumers are bypassing the traditional constraints of the LP and listening to a cherrypicked selection of hits. The playlist is now in the ascendant.

Since the advent of digital more than a decade ago, album sales have been falling steadily. There were 30m fewer albums sold in the UK last year than in 2009. Released last month, Lana Del Ray's third studio album, Ultraviolence, topped the charts in its first week with sales of just 48,000. Overall UK album sales for the same week did not even hit a million.

But the streaming figures for singles are buoyant. UK fans streamed an estimated 7.4bn songs in 2013, and there are 1.5bn playlists on Spotify compared with about 1.4m albums. Even the much-heralded success of the recent album X by Ed Sheeran (pictured second right) does not confirm the continued resilience of the LP format. While the album sold more than 367,000 copies in the UK in its first four weeks, the lead track, Sing, was streamed more than 2m times by Britons in half that time.

Playlists, in essence just a collection of hand-selected songs, are taking on a power of their own and the most popular playlist on Spotify, the Spotify Top 100, has more than 2 million subscribers.

The playlists are often grouped by genre, activity, mood, popularity or even put together by musicians themselves. Everyone from Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood to Snoop Dogg have created Spotify playlists offering insight into their own music tastes, while One Direction put together a playlist that featured songs the group liked to listen to while practising at Harry Styles's house.

Ergatoudis said: "The reality is, if you are looking at albums in pure sale volumes, it is shrinking away very rapidly. If you are talking about consumer behaviour on the streaming services, most people are not listening to albums. They are flicking through playlists … particularly if you are talking about the mass-market artists, we are now in a singles-based culture.

"We are nearing a point where some artists will more than likely break away from feeling like they have to deliver an album as their definitive piece of work and they will be happy with that. But I think the vast majority of musicians at the moment don't want to hear it. You can see how to suddenly to be told, 'Well, you can record an album but, bar a small fanbase, most people are only ever going to hear one track, and if you don't write that one hit track that is going to rise above the parapet, you may never get heard', is going to be a tough time for artists. But I think a new generation will emerge who will have less of a problem with that. Slowly, artists are going to have to let go of the album. The digital revolution is transforming the industry and that is unstoppable, whether we like it is irrelevant."

The making and listening to albums, Ergatoudis added, would soon become a "minority sport" and a culture of curated playlists was the future.

The playlist is now the target of multimillion-pound investment. It is believed to have driven Apple's purchase of the headphone brand Beats from Dr Dre, and with it Beats music – a streaming service whose chief selling point is playlists curated by music experts, as well as Google's recent purchase of the Songza app, which makes customised playlists of recommended songs for users.

Ergatoudis said in terms of "creativity and musical statement" albums still had relevance and merit, but making a living out of music would be harder as streaming goes mass market.

Mark Mulligan, a music industry analyst, said: "The death of the album is not something that's happened overnight … it's something that's happened over a good 10 years ever since we first had Napster allowing people to consume music on their own terms. Ever since then, everything that's happened in digital has really given consumers the power of choice and that power has suddenly made people realise they didn't always want to have complete albums. That trend during the 1980s and particularly the 1990s where labels started to fill every one of the minutes on a CD with filler tracks and fodder, meant a very large amount of poorer music was being released."

The digital transformation and a world of competing media, Mulligan added, had created an appetite for "post-album artists" who release their music as a continuous series of singles, a format more suited to the "short-attention-span generation".

But Fraser T Smith, the Grammy-winning producer behind tracks on two albums that have bucked the trend for poor albums sales – 21 by Adele and Sam Smith's recent debut, In the Lonely Hour – said he believed the LP would remain resilient and relevant owing to a select few artists. He said: "The figures speak for themselves in terms of the rise of streaming and how album sales are decreasing but from the creative point of view, what I take away from all of this is that great albums are still selling. The top tier of artists are still selling bucketloads, millions of albums, from Ed Sheeran to Adele to Sam Smith." The producer, who has also worked with Lily Allen, Ellie Goulding and Cee-Lo Green, added: "But I do think the future of the industry is that there is going to be this divide between artists who produce albums and those who don't, it's no longer going to become this uniform thing. "

While some musicians have been resistant to the decline of the album, others have begun to recognise and accept the changing tide. Tinie Tempah recently said his next album would most likely be his last. "This is a Spotify/iTunes/shuffle generation," he said. "I don't think people really listen to albums completely from track one to 12. People now curate their own playlists, so I think it's clever to beat them to it and say, 'Here it is, done for you.' A third album will emerge some time, but I think another after that is uncertain."

Ian Astbury from rock band the Cult echoed his sentiments. He said: "We won't be making a new album – probably never again. Albums are dead, the format is dead. iTunes has destroyed the whole idea of an album. It was a crucial part of the music industry between the 1970s and the 1990s, but it's been over for years now. It's simply an old format, it's just not up to date – and that's that."

Spotify's top singles

Rude Magic!

Summer Calvin Harris

Problem Ariana Grande ft. Iggy Azalea

Stay With Me Sam Smith

Chandelier Sia

Fancy Iggy Azalea ft. Charli XCX

Am I Wrong Nico & Vinz

A Sky Full Of Stars Coldplay

Rather Be Clean Bandit, Jess Glynne

Wiggle Jason Derulo, Snoop Dogg

Maps Maroon 5

Waves Mr Probz

Prayer in C Lilly Wood and The Prick, Robin Schulz

Classic MKTO

Stolen Dance Milky Chance

Sing Ed Sheeran

Bad (featuring Vassy) – radio edit David Guetta, Showtek, Vassy

All of Me John Legend

Happy Pharrell Williams

Break Free Ariana Grande ft. Zedd

Latch Disclosure ft. Sam Smith

• This piece was amended on 30 July to correct the name of Mark Mulligan

 

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