Agreed, not just the monetization scheme but Spotify and others just push the music listening experience to playlists and singles and have very little room for albums and collecting a library of music you refer to.

I’m not a music aficionado, and I have no interest in albums. I love the singles/playlist format, and consume far more music now that I can easily ignore the 9 out of 10 songs I don’t like in an album (back when CDs were still a thing).

I also find it easy to have a library of singles that I like.

Most of an album being bad as a stereotype I believe was just from actual bad artists when basically anyone could get a deal and possibly go platinum from a single song. Good artists typically had good albums

Possibly, but I think albums are only significant due to the historical medium of music requiring grouping songs together on various disks. Once it’s digital, I don’t see the importance of grouping certain songs together, outside of certain categories like movie soundtracks.

I guess some albums could tell some story about what the musician was feeling at some time, but that probably doesn’t apply for a lot of music if not most. Certainly not the music I listen to, release it one at a time or all together, makes no difference to me.

Long suites of thematically consistent music of course predates recorded music, so I don't think you can chalk it up entirely to the recording medium.

it really depends on how you like to listen to music. an album is often like a snapshot of the artist's sound at a certain point in time. if you listen to death cab for cutie's first and last album back-to-back, you might not realize it's the same band. if what you want out of a listening session is to hear a bunch of vaguely similar sounds in no particular order, an album doesn't do much for you. if you're in the mood for a more specific sound, a good album can be a lot better than eight solid tracks.

And, from everything I've seen (or else Spotify wouldn't be so big), you are in the vast, vast majority of music consumers.

Complaining about the death of the album is one thing, but the reality is that people like listening to singles and playlists.

> consume far more music now that I can easily ignore the 9 out of 10 songs I don’t like in an album (back when CDs were still a thing).

You mean the 9 out of 10 songs that the music label didn't push for airplay, video etc.

With Spotify, you don't "have" any music, you are at their mercy.

You can listen to albums just fine on Spotify. It turns out most people don't want to most of the time.

I don't understand why they haven't improved the platform. Anyone working on a better alternative?

If you're into electronic music you can also check Bleep (by Warp records). No DRM, you download your files and play them however you want.

https://bleep.com/

What do you think Bandcamp should be improving? What would a better alternative look like? Genuinely curious as an artist pretty satisfied with Bandcamp.

I don't think there needs to be an alternative, but Bandcamp needs to put more effort into getting more artists on its platform and for those artists to expand their catalogs. I buy a lot of albums on Bandcamp but it's annoying when I see a new release somewhere and the artist isn't on Bandcamp, or when an artist only puts their latest album there.

Bandcamp could also put more effort into recommendations based on a user's purchases, or just when viewing an artist's page. Not "we recommend this new album that is trending" but "this artist is similar to this other one" in the style that the old what.cd site had, with its massive graphed connections from one artist to another based on style (within a genre) of music.

The UI design is just awful for this day and age. It looks like MySpace from 15 years ago.

For example you get to an album page and there's just so much crap. The album and the player should be the main focus but the player is this tiny thing relegated into a corner.

The straight forward oldschool page layout is one of the things I really love about Bandcamp. It's clear and concise and fast.

Bandcamp's privacy settings are also pretty awful. There is no mechanism for making my library private; anyone can search my username and see what music I own. I suppose you can "hide" individual albums, but that's not great.

Are you talking about Spotify or Bandcamp? I believe OP was talking about Bandcamp.

I was talking about Spotify. I guess I misunderstood - thanks for clarifying that.

But it would also probably drive more sales and probably attract more artists.