The Year Pop Became an Album Again

I have been writing about pop music for long enough to have watched the album form almost die and then come back. The almost-dying happened in the early-to-mid 2010s, as streaming economies optimised the incentive structure around individual songs. The coming-back happened in 2024, more or less, and I want to try to articulate what it means.

The pre-streaming album

For most of the twentieth century, the pop album was the commercial unit. Artists released albums; audiences bought albums; critics reviewed albums. Singles existed as promotional tools for the albums, which were where the music actually lived.

This commercial structure had specific aesthetic consequences. Album tracklists were sequenced. Opening tracks were chosen to establish the record’s mood; closing tracks to resolve it. Deep-catalogue songs, the ones that did not function as singles, were permitted to be strange, long, or formally experimental because they lived inside the specific context of the album. An album was a sustained piece of music, not a collection of individual songs.

What streaming did

Streaming broke this structure incrementally across the 2010s. The Spotify revenue model rewards individual streams, not album purchases. An artist who produces five high-streaming songs earns more from streaming than an artist who produces a coherent twelve-track album. The economic pressure pushed artists toward releasing individual songs as quickly as possible, toward songs calibrated for the opening thirty seconds (where listeners decide whether to skip), and away from the specific deep-catalogue writing that made albums coherent.

By roughly 2017, the pop album had become, for most commercial artists, a loose collection of singles with filler between. Taylor Swift’s Reputation (2017) had this structure. The Weeknd’s Starboy (2016) had this structure. Drake’s consecutive 2010s releases had this structure. The albums were commercially successful but aesthetically diffuse.

There were exceptions. Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016). Frank Ocean’s Blonde (2016). Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. (2017). But these were exceptions, specifically made possible by specific artistic commitments to coherence, against the grain of the dominant commercial structure.

What 2024 was

Something changed in 2024. I am going to try to describe the change.

Four major pop releases of 2024, Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, Charli XCX’s Brat, and Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft, were all released as specifically coherent, sequenced albums. In late 2024, Tyler, the Creator’s CHROMAKOPIA joined them. These were not collections of singles with filler. They were albums in the older, stricter sense: with sequences that mattered, opening and closing choices that were specific, and tracklists that rewarded start-to-finish listening.

Each of these records, in its own way, operated against the streaming-optimised singles structure. Brat, at 41 minutes, was specifically short, but the specific sequencing (the progression from “360” through “Von dutch” to “Everything is romantic” to “Girl, so confusing” and on) was the album’s argument. Hit Me Hard and Soft was 43 minutes, carefully sequenced as a continuous listen, with specific segues between tracks that rewarded not skipping. CHROMAKOPIA at 54 minutes was explicitly built as a sequenced record with samples of Tyler’s mother threading between tracks.

Cowboy Carter and Tortured Poets Department were longer records (78 and 122 minutes respectively, including the Anthology extension of Swift’s), but both were specifically sequenced to work as coherent pieces. The length was not filler. The length was commitment to the album form.

Why the change

Several factors came together.

The artists had earned the commercial position to refuse the streaming singles-first model. Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Charli XCX, Billie Eilish, and Tyler, the Creator are all artists whose commercial standing does not require hit-single chasing. They sell records because they are who they are. The album form is available to them as a specific artistic commitment without commercial risk.

The streaming algorithms started rewarding coherent albums. Spotify, around 2022 and 2023, specifically adjusted its discovery algorithms to favour listeners who completed albums rather than skipping through playlists. The economic pressure that had pushed artists toward singles-first releases shifted, slightly, toward rewarding album completion. This is a minor effect but a real one.

The audience wanted albums again. Listeners who had spent a decade consuming fragmented playlists turned out to have retained a specific appetite for the sustained-listening experience. The 2024 releases found enormous audiences not in spite of being albums but because they were albums.

The physical-media economy came back. Vinyl sales have been increasing year over year since roughly 2018, and by 2024 were at levels not seen since the mid-1990s. A listener who buys a record on vinyl is predisposed to listen to it as an album rather than as a playlist. The physical-media comeback created, commercially, a specific cohort of listeners for whom the album form was the primary unit of consumption.

What this means

The album is not, I want to be clear, going to displace the single or the playlist as the dominant commercial form of pop music. The singles-first economy continues, and most working artists cannot afford to make the specific commitment that the 2024 albums made.

What has changed is that the album is, once again, a legitimate artistic option for pop artists operating at the commercial centre. Previously (say, between 2015 and 2022), an album-shaped record from a major pop artist was either an exception (like Lemonade) or a commercial miscalculation (like certain mid-2010s records that did not work). In 2024, album-shaped records were the commercial norm at the highest tier.

This matters for the shape of American popular music over the next several years. Young artists rising through the next cycle will have had the example of 2024 in front of them. The commercial possibility of the album is, once again, visible. Some of them will take it.

The specific albums to watch for

Several upcoming releases will test whether the 2024 pattern holds. Kendrick Lamar’s follow-up to GNX (late 2024) will indicate whether the form holds for him. The Cure’s already-planned companion to Songs of a Lost World will continue the specifically-album-era statement of that record. Frank Ocean’s rumoured third studio record, if it arrives, will be definitional.

I am, cautiously, optimistic. The album survived the streaming era. It is, against specific odds, in better health than it was five years ago.

Put a 2024 record on from start to finish. Pay attention to the sequence. Do not skip the deep cuts. The form has come back. The form deserves your attention.