This is sad and feels to me like a dumbing down of everything due to short attention spans.
I still prefer to listen to full coherent albums, and one of the highlights of my week is my Sunday run, which gives me time to listen to an album start to finish with no interruptions.
I hope some of my favorite musicians will continue to conceptualize albums that have a 45+ minute arc, even if market pressures mean that they'll initially need to release the tracks one at a time.
Even before streaming music, I don’t think many people listened to whole albums. I distributed a lot of custom CDs to people in high school because they wanted various singles off of different CDs and I had access to a CD burner and could rip and record them in custom mixes.
I personally find it too tedious to even work out the lyrics of the song because most of the time I can’t figure out what the singer is saying, or whatever cryptic message it is. I just listen for the sounds, mostly, and that scratches my itch sufficiently to not make it worth my while to look more into it. But I can understand if some people do have an interest in it.
I listen to whole albums. I still buy CDs primarily because I don't want piecemeal "hits" when there's gold in the material that will never see wide promotion. You'll never hear that without buying an album. Live albums in particular don't work at all in the streaming era where tracks are discrete units that can't flow into each other. When I rip a CD I know with 100% certainty the gaps will be seamless.
There was once a time in popular music when you could actually understand the words coming out of a singer's mouth, as they weren't digitally over-processed, enhanced with autotune, and mixed into a zero-dynamic-range soup of loudness. Maybe I'm just old and out of touch, but I often can't tell the difference between modern pop song singers--many sound more like the output of a DSP than human.
I still prefer to listen to full coherent albums, and one of the highlights of my week is my Sunday run, which gives me time to listen to an album start to finish with no interruptions.
I hope some of my favorite musicians will continue to conceptualize albums that have a 45+ minute arc, even if market pressures mean that they'll initially need to release the tracks one at a time.