The LP is dead. It is survived by artists everywhere, who will be influenced by the art form for years to come.
Born to Columbia Records in 1948, the long-playing (LP) record ran circles around its elder sibling, the 78. Shedding the staticky shellac synthetic of the 78, the LP’s vinyl construction produced a cleaner, crisper tone. Its 12-inch stature and 33 rpm speed allowed for more minutes of playing time than any of its predecessors. Inscribed in its grooves, artists found a new code of corpus production: 10-12 songs, 30-45 minutes, one coherent album.
This new format broadened the canvas of expression within a single disc. Jazz musicians were first to take this shift in stride, using the album as an opportunity to comprehensively explore new styles; Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and John Coltrane’s Giant Steps are a few famous examples of this phenomenon. In the 1960s, popular music took the torch of innovation, engineering the concept album: a coherent story or theme carried across a collection of songs. The Beach Boys famously perfected this form with the lush, alluring Pet Sounds, to which The Beatles retorted with the scintillating Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band. Two years later, The Who pushed the boundaries of the album still further with the first ever rock opera, “Tommy.”
From the 1960s forward, the LP album established itself as the quintessential mode of musical expression, and the entire music industry became fitted to its features. Aspiring artist were disciplined by record labels with deadlines for writing and recording 10-12 songs. After routine artistic deliberations on track order, album art, and liner notes, an artist’s work was finally deemed ready for placement on record store shelves. The LP structured an artist’s operations on the road as well. Tours became centered around album promotion, and the 10-12 songs of an LP provided the perfect amount of new content to add to ones setlist. Albums had become the locus of all professional musical endeavors.
It wasn’t long before this favorite child of the music industry began competing for attention with its slimmer, sleeker siblings. The cassette, released in 1968, steadily gained popularity in the 1970s and 1980s for its compact design. LPs still sold, but more and more consumers were willing to pass on vinyl’s alluring album art and graceful grooves for this new plastic box which could be conveniently slipped into a car dashboard or boombox. Even more alarming for the LP was the rise of the famed and feared mixtape. Rather than listen to an artist’s released work front to back, as the LP encouraged, listeners at home could dub their favorite individual songs from their records or radio onto a blank tape, curating an individualized listening experience. Thus, a dissonance grew between how the artist packaged their material and how the consumer experienced it. While artists still followed the conventions of the LP, taking time to create enticing album art and arranging their tracks in optimal order, consumers lurched towards a less dazzling, more convenient way to play.
If the cassette tugged at the fabric of album ascendancy, the CD ripped it completely apart. Introduced in 1982, this diminutive doppelgänger of its predecessor had the appearance of an LP shrunken in the wash. Much like with cassettes, consumers were willing to pass on the comely, weighted feel of an LP for another portable plastic box with mix-taping capabilities. By the early 1990s, the LP was wobbling on the edge of the wastebasket. It was finally nudged into oblivion by the emergence of music digitization in the early 2000s. In both legal and illegal fashions, consumers began using computers to transfer the music of their CDs with MP3 files, turning their backs completely on the aesthetic of physical product for weightless ones and zeros. The market soon caught up with this phenomenon; platforms allowing consumers to purchase files directly from the internet rose to prominence. Consumers were further encouraged to ignore the greater body of an artist’s produced work for individual tracks of an album.
Consumers’ slow rejection of the LP’s conventions solidified in the 2010s with the rise of music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. The all-you-can-eat nature of these platforms encouraged consumers to take bites out of the works of an array of artists rather than devouring one singular product. Streamlining the playlist-making process, these sites reinforced consumers’ cravings for an individualized listening experience. The shift away from albums is well documented. In one 2016 study by the Music Business Association, 77% of surveyed participants acknowledged playlists and single song streaming as their dominant mode of listening. Comparatively, only 22% of participants still favored listening to albums. Creators of album charts, such as Billboard, have had to acknowledge that the most successful albums are no longer those selling the most whole copies. Their solution was the mythical metric of “streaming album equivalents.” For Billboard, this means weighing every 1,250 subscription paid streams and every 3,750 free, ad-supported streams as one album unit to count towards the total number of records sold. This assuredly arbitrary algorithm boosted albums to the top of the charts off the success of only a handful of hits.
With the singular sensation of holding a piece of physical music, poring over its liner notes, and playing front to back finally meeting its maker, some makers of music bemoan the album as an outdated model of production. For artists who labor for months to create their 12-song statement to the world, it can be downright disheartening to see the majority of their tracks disregarded. In response, some artists are preferring to focus more on singles and EPs—a pattern of production that we haven’t witnessed on a large scale since the 1950s, when the album had not yet been embraced as the premier format of recording. This method not only ensures that individual songs are not lost in the greater catalog of an album, but it also allows for artists to release music with greater frequency. A smaller, steadier stream of content is phenomenal fuel for an artist’s fanbase, keeping them continually interested. With none of the hurdles that come with pressing and packaging physical product, a frequent output of content is both doable and desirable.
Still, the LP resists relegation to the glass cases of the Smithsonian with the other obsolete inventions of music’s past. After being buried below cassettes, CDs, and Spotify, a new generation of listeners has dug the LP out of its grave. Some are enticed by its collectible nature. Others are searching for a superior stereophonic experience. A third group is staging a desperate escape from the Silicon Valley giants collecting and selling data of every stream. Whatever the motive, vinyl revival has arrived. The LP is now the fastest growing form of physical music. In some sense, the LP itself has taken a similar trajectory to the genres of music that were once inscribed in its grooves. Just as jazz and rock have gone from chart-topping sensations to somewhat niche genres with smaller audiences, the LP has abdicated its role as the primary purveyor of music for a second life as an item of nostalgia.
The lengthy life and times of the album is a captivating saga. Yet, to dramatize on all the foes the LP has fought, as I have attempted, might miss the forest for the trees. The shock value that this topic provides is proof itself that the album still looms large over the cultural conscience of America. The LP is no longer a titan of the music market, and some artists are indeed leaning towards a more piecemeal manner of production, yet the album still stands as the benchmark achievement for musicians everywhere. Despite vast changes in technology, the conventions of production that the LP provided are preferred by most artists. While recording musicians are no longer bound to the 45 minutes limit of what could fit on a record, many still value this length as the optimal balance between substantial and succinct. Album art survives as well; despite some musicians forgoing physical music altogether, the tradition of creating a colorful cover is embraced by all. The “album,” as we refer to it today may be a skeleton of its former self, the LP, yet decades of cultural prominence have knighted the album with a reverence that won’t be lost on the music industry for years to come.
