Listening to albums in their entirety...

S

strawberrycake

New member
The first time I listen to an album, it's in it's entirety, in order.

After that, I skip songs I dislike, or listen to certain songs I like a lot.
I refuse to listen to songs I dislike.
 
I'm a purist in the sense that I believe a recording should be listened to all the way through. Many recordings ebb and flow in a way that is lost when songs are cherry picked. The journey the artists wants to take you on is missed. I know that with the advent of buying by the song many people never listen to entire albums anymore. I really think it's a shame. I pretty much only listen to entire recordings. This also makes me a very picky buyer as I won't buy anything that I don't like the majority of.

Some recordings will blow you away, but only when the impact of the entire recording is experienced. There's so much to this idea. Often a slow ballad is the perfect rest from a blasting song that preceeded it. Other times, the entire recording will be themed and the theme goes unnoticed with just a song or two. I know there are advantages to the cherry picking method, but I'd never switch.

Thoughts?
 
I've been an album person since the time I started buying music around 9 or 10 years old, and I still listen to albums start to finish 99% of the time.

But that doesn't keep me from shuffling my collection or making a playlist once in a while, or cherry-picking a song here or there that I feel like listening to.

There are also singles from when I was a kid that I enjoy for nostalgic reasons but couldn't care less to hear the entire album because it's not my thing.
 
I can be impatient and skip songs, but I'd prefer that I didn't do that. I do like to look at an album as something that is both a whole piece of music and--if the structure applies, a collection of smaller pieces of music. I think it's good to appreciate both aspects.
 
I don't always do this, a lot of the time I do but I have a real knack for making compilations and playlists so a lot of the time I'll just bung a load of different tracks together from different artists and listen like that.

Or sometimes I really just crave a few tracks off of an album (for example, this morning I listened to just Velouria, Ana, All Over The World, Dig For Fire, Down To The Well off of Bossanova).
 
Save space? My old computer had very limited capacity so I got used to doing it. I have a new computer now though with loaRAB of space so I should probably stop doing it, I'm sure I've missed out on loaRAB of songs that would have grown on me.
 
I think it depenRAB on the album. Though I am overall an "album" kind of person, there's a lot of music out there that was never particularly intended to be digested in album form.
 
I love albums that tell a story all the way through ... Wale's newest album comes to mind, but today that is not really what artists are doing and it sucks. I generally listen to entire albums, but not at once. My roommate will get a new album, listen to it all the way through, then put the songs he likes on his ipod. I like that
 
I don't have a single song in my music collection. Everything is in album format. I do prefer to listen to whole albums as opposed to individual songs or select groups of songs, but there are definite exceptions to this.

One thing that I point out frequently on this forum is that the full length album format, or LP is only about 50 years old, less than half the span of time of recorded music history. it wasn't until about the early 70's that artists began creating music with the holistic intention of it being appreciated as not only a collection of individual songs, but also as a greater more inclusive work.

Basically there are albums that are strictly a collection of individual songs an albums that can only be appreciated in the wider sense of a musical suite.
 
That's the whole point in purchasing an album. It's a collection of songs that you can bask in and listen to and thoroughly enjoy them from begining to end. That's how albums should be listened to, in there "entirety".
 
... Yeah. All of this. You guys got to it before I could :banghead:

Personally, it wasn't until I began to digest albums in their entirety that I began to actually become passionate about it. Beforehand, it had simply been 'play a few Floyd and Led Zeppelin songs while you play Runescape' or something, but once I actually got around to investing time and thought into the music, was around when it started to give back to me too. That sort of coincided with when I started torrenting in place of Limewire-ing, so that I could get full albums more easily. So I owe A LOT to torrenting.

There are some exceptions (with power violence for example, I generally listen to it in snippets), but in general, I've been an album person for basically my entire 'music-listening' life.
 
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