Album era

The album era was a period in English-language popular music from the mid-1960s to the mid-2000s in which the album was the dominant form of recorded music expression and consumption. It was primarily driven by three successive music recording formats: the 33⅓ rpm long-playing record (LP), the audiocassette, and the compact disc. Rock musicians from the US and the UK were often at the forefront of the era, which is sometimes called the album-rock era in reference to their sphere of influence and activity. The term "album era" is also used to refer to the marketing and aesthetic period surrounding a recording artist's album release.

LP albums developed in the early 20th century and were originally marketed for classical music and wealthier adult consumers. However, singles still dominated the music industry, eventually through the success of rock and roll performers in the 1950s, when the LP format was utilized more for soundtrack, jazz, and some pop recordings. It was not until the mid-1960s, when the Beatles began to release artistically ambitious and top-selling LPs, that more rock and pop acts followed suit and the industry embraced albums to immense success while burgeoning rock criticism validated their cultural value. By the next decade, the LP had emerged as a fundamental artistic unit and a widely popular item with young people, often marketed using the idea of a concept album, which was employed especially by progressive musicians in both rock and soul.

At the end of the 1970s, LP albums experienced a decline in sales while the singles format was reemphasized by the developments of punk rock, disco, and MTV's music video programming. The record industry combatted this trend by gradually displacing LPs with CDs, releasing fewer singles that were hits to force sales of their accompanying albums, and inflating the prices of CD albums over the next two decades, when their production proliferated. The success of major pop stars led to the development of an extended rollout model among record labels, marketing an album around a catchy lead single, an attention-grabbing music video, novel merchandise, media coverage, and a supporting concert tour. Women and black musicians continued to gain critical recognition among the album era's predominantly white-male and rock-oriented canon, with the burgeoning hip hop genre developing album-based standards in its own right. In the 1990s, the music industry saw an alternative rock and country music boom, leading to a revenue peak of $15 billion in 1999 based in CD sales. However, the development of file sharing networks such as Napster began to undermine the format's viability, as consumers were able to rip and share CD tracks digitally over the Internet.

In the early 21st century, music downloading and streaming services emerged as popular means of distribution, as album sales suffered a steep decline and recording acts generally focused on singles, effectively ending the album era. The critical paradigm also shifted away from rock and toward more innovative works being produced in pop and urban music, which dominated record sales in the 2000s. High-profile pop acts continued to market their albums seriously, with surprise releases emerging as a popular strategy. While physical music sales declined further worldwide, the CD remained popular in some countries such as Japan, due in part to the marketing and fandom surrounding top-selling Japanese idol performers, whose success represented a growing shift away from the global dominance of major English-language acts. By the end of the 2010s, concept albums had reemerged with culturally relevant and critically successful personal narratives. Meanwhile, pop and rap artists garnered the most album streams with minimal marketing that capitalized on the digital era's on-demand consumer culture, which evolved even more rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the music industry.

Pre-history

Technological developments in the early 20th century led to sweeping changes in the way recorded music was made and sold. Prior to the LP, the standard medium for recorded music had been the 78 rpm gramophone record, made from shellac and featuring a three-to-five minute capacity per side. The capacity limitations placed constraints on the composing processes of recording artists, while the fragility of shellac prompted the packaging of these records in empty booklets resembling photo albums, with typically brown-colored wrapping paper as covers. The introduction of polyvinyl chloride in record production led to vinyl records, which played with less noise and more durability.

In the 1940s, the market for commercial- and home-use recordings was dominated by the competing RCA Victor and Columbia Records, whose chief engineer Peter Carl Goldmark pioneered the development of the 12-inch long play (LP) vinyl record. This format could hold recordings as long as 52 minutes, or 26 minutes per side, at a speed of 33⅓ rpm, and was playable with a small-tipped "microgroove" stylus designed for home playback systems. Officially introduced in 1948 by Columbia, LPs became known as "record albums", termed in reference to the photo album-like 78 packaging. Another innovation from Columbia was the addition of graphic and typographic design to album jacket covers, introduced by Alex Steinweiss, the label's art director. Encouraged by its positive effect on LP sales, the music industry adopted illustrated album covers as a standard by the 1950s.

Originally, the album was primarily marketed for classical music listeners, and the first LP released was '' Mendelssohn: Concerto in E Minor for Violin and Orchestra Op. 64'' (1948) by Nathan Milstein and the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York. Film soundtracks, Broadway show cast recordings, jazz musicians, and some pop singers such as Frank Sinatra soon utilized the new longer format. Jazz artists especially, such as Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Dave Brubeck, preferred the LP for how its capacity allowed them to record their compositions with concert-length arrangements and improvisations. The original Broadway cast recording of the musical '' Kiss Me, Kate'' (1949) sold 100,000 copies in its first month of release and, together with ''South Pacific'' (which topped the album charts for 63 weeks), brought more attention to LPs, while the Broadway cast recording of '' My Fair Lady'' became the first LP to sell one million copies. However, in the 1950s and into the 1960s, 45 rpm seven-inch single sales were still considered the primary market for the music industry, and albums remained a secondary market. The careers of notable rock and roll performers such as Elvis Presley were driven primarily by single sales.

1960s: Beginnings in the rock era

Concept albums and ''Rubber Soul'' (1964–1966)

The arrival of the Beatles in the US in 1964 is credited by music writers Ann Powers and Joel Whitburn as heralding the "classic album era" or "rock album era". In his ''Concise Dictionary of Popular Culture'', Marcel Danesi comments that "the album became a key aspect of the countercultural movement of the 1960s, with its musical, aesthetic, and political themes. From this, the 'concept album' emerged, with the era being called the 'album era. According to media academic Roy Shuker, with the development of the concept album in the 1960s, "the album changed from a collection of heterogeneous songs into a narrative work with a single theme, in which individual songs segue into one another", "unified by a theme, which can be instrumental, compositional, narrative, or lyrical".

Conversely, popular culture historian Jim Cullen says the concept album is "sometimes rroneouslyassumed to be a product of the rock era", with '' The A.V. Club'' writer Noel Murray arguing that Sinatra's 1950s LPs, such as '' In the Wee Small Hours'' (1955), had pioneered the form earlier with their "thematically linked songs". Similarly, Will Friedwald observes that Ray Charles had also released thematically unified albums at the turn of the 1960s that made him a major LP artist in R&B, peaking in 1962 with the high-selling '' Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music''.

The track listings on these antecedents, however, typically consisted of material that was not written by the artist. With their hot rod-themed 1963 release '' Little Deuce Coupe'', the Beach Boys became the first act to release a concept album that consisted almost entirely of original songwriting. In his 2006 book ''American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3'', academic Larry Starr credits the Beach Boys' 1964 concept albums '' Shut Down Volume 2'' and '' All Summer Long'' with marking "the beginnings of ... the increasing importance of album tracks, and eventually of albums themselves". Music journalist Gary Graff points to Bob Dylan's ''Highway 61 Revisited'' (released in August 1965) as another possible starting point to the album era, as it constituted "a cohesive and conceptual body of work rather than just some hit singles... with filler tracks."

Danesi cites the Beatles' December 1965 release '' Rubber Soul'' as one of the era's first concept albums. According to music historian Bill Martin, ''Rubber Soul'' was the "turning point" for popular music, in that for the first time "the ''album'' rather than the song became the basic unit of artistic production." Author David Howard agrees, saying that "pop's stakes had been raised into the stratosphere" by ''Rubber Soul'' and that "suddenly, it was more about making a great album without filler than a great single." In January 1966, ''Billboard'' magazine referred to the opening sales of ''Rubber Soul'' in the US (1.2 million copies over nine days) as proof of teenage record-buyers gravitating towards the LP format. While it was in keeping with the industry norm in the UK, the lack of a hit single on ''Rubber Soul'' added to the album's identity in the US as a self-contained artistic statement.

Following the Beatles' example, several rock albums intended as artistic statements were released in 1966, including the Rolling Stones' '' Aftermath'', the Beach Boys' '' Pet Sounds'', Dylan's ''Blonde on Blonde'', the Beatles' own ''Revolver'', and the Who's '' A Quick One''. Music journalist Mat Snow cites these five releases, together with Otis Redding's 1965 LP '' Otis Blue'', as evidence that "the album era was here, and though hit singles still mattered, they were no longer pop's most important money spinners and artistic statements." According to Jon Pareles

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