Digital-only albums: why bother with Track order?

[GregB]

Ordering tracks on an album is the final step along the already long and fractious creative journey. After writing, recording, editing, arranging, mixing and mastering ... the decisions about track ORDER can be mind-numbingly tedious.  But, these days, does it really matter any more?

 

For me it does. After decades of vinyl, the final staging of all my favourite album made a huge impact on my listening enjoyment.  The opening and closing statements, the juxtaposition of simple/complex, loud/soft, and also runs of tracks that have a flow/build of energy.  To me, these elements contribute to an album’s impact. 

 

But this additional layer, the overall gloss, will be lost to the coming generations.

 

Issues with Digital-only releases

 

Acquiring music was not instantaneous pre-internet. One had to save money, visit a shop to buy the 'disc' (and sometimes just to order it), and then travel back home before one could listen.

 

For younger readers, the 45 rpm vinyl single and the 33 rpm album, had two playing sides. A light arm ending in an electro-magnetic capsule that held a pickup needle had to be placed on the disc surface. The needle vibrated according to the wave forms pressed into micro-grooves, the vibration being converted to electrical signals which could be amplified. Most people let the needle down on the outside edge and it played across the whole disc surface before it was lifted off from the inside near the central label, and the disc turned over to the other playing side. This all involved a sense of wonder, anticipation, physical involvement handling the components, watching the spinning disc, and ‘settling down’ to listen. The last track of any side had time to linger in the mind as one summoned the energy to get up and flip the record over, or take one record off and put another on.

 

Streaming platforms make it impossible to structure an album according to ‘discs’ and ‘sides’. This is a shame as the ordering/placement of tracks was part of the experience. Record players never had remotes. To skip tracks you had to carefully lift the arm/needle and lower it onto the narrow gap before the desired track. If the arm slipped at any stage, you could damage the needle or the record ... or even both! With physical records, as most people were too careful about the potential damage to their expensive purchases (or too lazy to keep getting up), people tended to listen to every track.

 

Music therefore got the time to grow on you. The structure and continuity too could affect how well an album was received. The first two and last two tracks were considered particularly important and were chosen and placed very carefully by the record companies, and later the artists themselves, to maximise impact (and therefore the sales).

 

With CDs it became a breeze to skip tracks via a button on the player or a remote. It also became lazy income for record companies to churn out "best of" compilations (which were rarely the best) and the tracks often appeared to be shovelled on without much thought. CDs had arbitrarily-inserted inter-track gaps purely for the ability to jump to a ‘track’ which, on vinyl, had been part of continuous music. The first time I noticed this was "Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon", the "Make Me Smile” medley, a nearly thirteen-minute suite from Chicago's 1970 album Chicago (also called Chicago II) ... now ruined by hard 2-sec gaps.  

 

Post-CD, in the streaming digital world, when one album finishes another starts, or even plays adverts! If something doesn’t grab you in the first five seconds, we skip it. If we like it, we add it to our playlist. Playlists usually have mixed content that spans albums from the same artist as well as from other artists and can be sorted any which way. It is a musical omelette made only from instant/favourite ingredients. (Don’t get me started on “shuffle”!).

 

The sensibility around an album being a cohesive creation/concept, to be heard in its entirety, is therefore fast disappearing from our collective cultural memory.

 

I spent days on determining the playing order for “The Flat White Album” (2020) which had 30 tracks, double-checking by listening to 15-sec starts/ends.  The result was that  I started and ended the album with songs about climate change, the 2^nd and 2^nd-last tracks were pure acoustic vocal/guitar songs, the ‘Sunrise’/’Sunset’ instrumentals were mirrored at #5 and #25, tracks with ‘heavy’ messages were followed by something 'light', and the last third of the album had an increasing intensity in the music.  Two years on and I’m still happy with that final ordering (whew!), but I’m probably the only person who will ever care or even notice. ☹

Edited December 29, 2021 by GregB
Typo

[Clay Anderson Johnson]

5 hours ago, GregB said:

The sensibility around an album being a cohesive creation/concept, to be heard in its entirety, is fast disappearing from our collective cultural memory.

 

Great point! I well remember albums having a deliberate sequence intended by the artist. It adds to the listening experience immensely.

 

A parallel one is sequencing a set as a show not just a group of songs. Keith Richards says the worst decision of his entire life was due to this.

 

In 1964 the Rolling Stones had the option of preceding James Brown or following him at the TAMI Show in Los Angeles. Following him meant being the headliner which they chose although they had only been a band for two years.

 

James Brown was a pro who went on and KILLED. He worked the audience into such a frenzy they were jumping up and down. The Rolling Stones were an anticlimax afterwards. Richards says it was the most embarrassing moment he can remember.

Edited November 7, 2021 by Clay Anderson Johnson

[john]

Good post Greg.

 

I completely agree about track order. People always created mix tapes, with tracks out of context. They didn’t always listen to tracks in the order they were placed in vinyl. They always dropped the needle on specific tracks. What people now do is that on steroids, but I still think there are plenty of fans who think it is important to experience them in the way the artist intended, at least once.
 

I would say, for me, I listen to tracks in the order they were released on the album about 60-70% of the time. I listen to a load of single tracks, but when I am working painting, drawing or coding, I listen to full albums… unless I am building playlists.

[Mahesh]

I completely agree that the relevance of the concept of an album is diminishing at least from the audience perspective due to the retention period of the younger demographic reducing further, & further, & further. Micro content & the influence of social media over the decade has really steered the ways of an artist to strange unexpecting places.

 

Having said that, I've been listening to the album "Dawn" by Yebba A LOT over the past month and it's wonderful how my ears have become acquainted to the flow of the tracks as intended by the artist (& producer). Since the album deals a lot about Yebba's relationship with her mother who died of suicide weeks before the artist became famous, the whole album & the track order speaks of a much larger narrative/story compared to the individual songs themselves. It's been so long since I've fallen in love with an album in entirety like I have with this one. And it feels frikkin' good.

 

 

[Glammerocity]

I think a lot of the old "artistic concept" was overblown. Something like Dark Side of the Moon was order-specific but a lot of ordering was just to avoid having all the fast songs together. But maybe a listener, the consumer who paid the musician for the product, only wants the fast songs, the hits, the ones with the hooks, and isn't particularly enamoured of the musician's idea that they're an "artist" producing art.

 

I'm in the school of thought that the MP3 was only bad for filler, because you couldn't package sub-standard songs as an album concept anymore. There are songs on my most fave albums that I don't need. And the bands knew it when recording, because you can hear the production values drop considerably on the songs they knew weren't that great. So I'm all for consumer control over how they listen. If you want the whole of Dark Side of the Moon, it's there for you but I'd bet there are many Pink Floyd fans who've played Money or Great Gig in the Sky far more than the clocks in a whole-album listen.

 

I've listened to a lot of kpop in the last few years, where the mini-album of 5-8 songs is very common. I'd contend it's what listeners have been doing for years anyway.

[GregB]

On 3/27/2022 at 11:46 PM, Glammerocity said:

I think a lot of the old "artistic concept" was overblown

 

Hi Glam

 

I agree with "a lot" ... e.g. even "Sgt Pepper" wasn't really a concept album. 

 

We're all different and we each consume music in a manner that suits us.   Personally I never bought an album (vinyl) unless I had heard it and could listen to and like all the way through, and hence I didn't own many!    Then again, I was always tight for cash in my younger days.

 

But any new album I that I listen to, provided I haven't thrown up after the first couple of tracks, I'll listen to from start to finish so I can judge it's place in the world of albums.  Sometimes the transition of a particularly pleasing track finish/start can be reflected later in one's own work.

 

Cheers,

Greg

 

 

 

 

[Greg M]

On 11/7/2021 at 1:00 PM, GregB said:

Ordering tracks on an album is the final step along the already long and fractious creative journey. After writing, recording, editing, arranging, mixing and mastering ... the decisions about track ORDER can be mind-numbingly tedious.  But, these days, does it really matter any more?

 

For me it does. After decades of vinyl, the final staging of all my favourite album made a huge impact on my listening enjoyment.  The opening and closing statements, the juxtaposition of simple/complex, loud/soft, and also runs of tracks that have a flow/build of energy.  To me, these elements contribute to an album’s impact. 

 

But this additional layer, the overall gloss, will be lost to the coming generations.

 

Issues with Digital-only releases

 

Acquiring music was not instantaneous pre-internet. One had to save money, visit a shop to buy the 'disc' (and sometimes just to order it), and then travel back home before one could listen.

 

For younger readers, the 45 rpm vinyl single and the 33 rpm album, had two playing sides. A light arm ending in an electro-magnetic capsule that held a pickup needle had to be placed on the disc surface. The needle vibrated according to the wave forms pressed into micro-grooves, the vibration being converted to electrical signals which could be amplified. Most people let the needle down on the outside edge and it played across the whole disc surface before it was lifted off from the inside near the central label, and the disc turned over to the other playing side. This all involved a sense of wonder, anticipation, physical involvement handling the components, watching the spinning disc, and ‘settling down’ to listen. The last track of any side had time to linger in the mind as one summoned the energy to get up and flip the record over, or take one record off and put another on.

 

Streaming platforms make it impossible to structure an album according to ‘discs’ and ‘sides’. This is a shame as the ordering/placement of tracks was part of the experience. Record players never had remotes. To skip tracks you had to carefully lift the arm/needle and lower it onto the narrow gap before the desired track. If the arm slipped at any stage, you could damage the needle or the record ... or even both! With physical records, as most people were too careful about the potential damage to their expensive purchases (or too lazy to keep getting up), people tended to listen to every track.

 

Music therefore got the time to grow on you. The structure and continuity too could affect how well an album was received. The first two and last two tracks were considered particularly important and were chosen and placed very carefully by the record companies, and later the artists themselves, to maximise impact (and therefore the sales).

 

With CDs it became a breeze to skip tracks via a button on the player or a remote. It also became lazy income for record companies to churn out "best of" compilations (which were rarely the best) and the tracks often appeared to be shovelled on without much thought. CDs had arbitrarily-inserted inter-track gaps purely for the ability to jump to a ‘track’ which, on vinyl, had been part of continuous music. The first time I noticed this was "Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon", the "Make Me Smile” medley, a nearly thirteen-minute suite from Chicago's 1970 album Chicago (also called Chicago II) ... now ruined by hard 2-sec gaps.  

 

Post-CD, in the streaming digital world, when one album finishes another starts, or even plays adverts! If something doesn’t grab you in the first five seconds, we skip it. If we like it, we add it to our playlist. Playlists usually have mixed content that spans albums from the same artist as well as from other artists and can be sorted any which way. It is a musical omelette made only from instant/favourite ingredients. (Don’t get me started on “shuffle”!).

 

The sensibility around an album being a cohesive creation/concept, to be heard in its entirety, is therefore fast disappearing from our collective cultural memory.

 

I spent days on determining the playing order for “The Flat White Album” (2020) which had 30 tracks, double-checking by listening to 15-sec starts/ends.  The result was that  I started and ended the album with songs about climate change, the 2^nd and 2^nd-last tracks were pure acoustic vocal/guitar songs, the ‘Sunrise’/’Sunset’ instrumentals were mirrored at #5 and #25, tracks with ‘heavy’ messages were followed by something 'light', and the last third of the album had an increasing intensity in the music.  Two years on and I’m still happy with that final ordering (whew!), but I’m probably the only person who will ever care or even notice. ☹

I totally agree with you about listening to albums and all the thought that went into ordering the tracks. I often expect one track to be followed by the one it was followed by on the original album, and it almost creates a discordant feeling when this doesn't happen, like when somebody puts a CD on and sets it to mixed playback. One of the most annoying examples of this for me is the Purple rain album by Prince, "I would die for U" runs straight into "Baby I'm a Star" on the soundtrack and in the film itself, as they are performed onstage in the film. But the are separated on CD and so "I would die for you" is never followed by "Baby I'm a star" when I listen to my playlists. 

I also read recently that Adele got her music company to do a deal with online music sites to ensure that the order of her songs on her latest album were protected when people bought the download version. 

[Greg M]

On 3/27/2022 at 2:46 PM, Glammerocity said:

I think a lot of the old "artistic concept" was overblown. Something like Dark Side of the Moon was order-specific but a lot of ordering was just to avoid having all the fast songs together. But maybe a listener, the consumer who paid the musician for the product, only wants the fast songs, the hits, the ones with the hooks, and isn't particularly enamoured of the musician's idea that they're an "artist" producing art.

 

I'm in the school of thought that the MP3 was only bad for filler, because you couldn't package sub-standard songs as an album concept anymore. There are songs on my most fave albums that I don't need. And the bands knew it when recording, because you can hear the production values drop considerably on the songs they knew weren't that great. So I'm all for consumer control over how they listen. If you want the whole of Dark Side of the Moon, it's there for you but I'd bet there are many Pink Floyd fans who've played Money or Great Gig in the Sky far more than the clocks in a whole-album listen.

 

I've listened to a lot of kpop in the last few years, where the mini-album of 5-8 songs is very common. I'd contend it's what listeners have been doing for years anyway.

 

I think that a lot of the albums that are now referred to as "concept" albums were, at the time, just progressive rock albums, where a lot of the tracks were the product of the effects of drugs on the consciousness of the writer, rather than a planned idea that spanned the whole album.  Sometimes the concept was in the mind of the writers/composers, but it didn't necessarily transfer to the listening experience of the listener. "Tales from Topographic Oceans" was a concept album by YES, based on Indian religious writings, but I have no idea what it was about. Whereas, "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" by Genesis was definitely a concept album and I new exactly what it was about. Often the label "concept" is used too freely, an inaccurately. A lot of album music that came out in the late 60s and 70s contained longer songs that could afford to take the time to tell a more detailed story, or stories, like "The hero and the madman" by Thin Lizzy. This was in complete contrast to the singles market at the time which was largely full of songs about love and broken hearts. A lot of it was very good but still quite limited in scope.

There was a clear dichotomy between albums and singles, and what they were used for. The record players and early stereos were designed with this in mind. You could stack up seven or eight singles on a record player and it would play them one after the other. You could do the same with albums, but you could mix them, because they played at different speeds. The idea of picking out the fast songs or slow songs is very much a product of the age of CDs and downloads. You could create your own mixes in the 70s by copying tracks onto cassette tapes, and so the music industry developed "music centres" that allowed you to record directly from vinyl to tape, but it was still largely full albums that got recorded and passed around. That's why the most popular cassette tapes were 90 minutes long, so that they would accommodate a whole album or LP.

[hariossa]

I think that not only concept albums are lost nowadays, also the whole album idea is an anachronism, right now it seems to be just songs without any context, like releasing single after single. I'm more of an album person, even the filler tracks are part of an album mood.

[Tonedead]

I recently got the new FKA Twigs album that plays out a bit like a concept album. Arca's Kick and Kick II are strongly in the category along the Bjork album Utopia that they produced with her. Youth Lagoon's 'Wondrous Bughouse' has a central theme.The last Chromatics album could be considered one.Weeknd has taken some sort of stab at it and electronic prog is a thing now

 

It's out there if you look for it 

 

I have had plans to upload some of my newer tracks in a particular order on mixcloud when they are done and done,in case anyone would want to hear them in the order I would have them in.