Music Industry Research Paper

Album format in the music industry has been around for a long time. But now, the rise of music streaming platform and the way listener can easily make a playlist through their music streaming platform, do people still listen to an album? Are albums necessary anymore for music artist to make? For a handful of artists, an album is like a grand vision, a story experience. A popular example is Kendrick Lamar masterpiece albums, "To Pimp A Butterfly" and, "Good Kid, M.A.A.D City". These two albums have a narrative that is best experienced when listening to the whole thing from start to finish. But for the vast majority of an artist, an album is just a collection of tracks. Albums are expensive and time-consuming to make and, for the most part,

Is the album doomed to become nothing but a playlist fodder? And if the album is dead, shouldn't everyone just be making a single song hoping that it would get popular? Absolutely not. Albums aren't dead. Streaming has just made them less important for listeners. But that doesn't mean they aren't useful on the creative side. Album can be a stepping stone for the artist or as a milestone and can change listener's view about something through their album. And for the artist, of course, a single is a start to make their name, but to stay in the music industry for a long time, artists have to make a big project or record to stay relevant in the long run. They can't just release a single over and over again hoping every single they release to be a hit song. Artists write songs, and artists don't just make hits by deciding that particular song are going to be hit, it's the audience that decides which songs are going to be hit. A hit comes through the process of writing many songs, you keep writing until you get that hit. And what about when artists perform live? Performing live is still a big part of artists to make money. Are they just going to put out nothing but single for the rest of their career? And then when they go perform live, they only had 5 or 6 songs to their name and that's it? They have to drop more tracks than that to actually have material for people to listen to and people to actually see them perform when they play