Of course, for this to happen, you have to listen to artists who make genuine albums as opposed to hit+filler mixtures.

I still appreciate single songs for what they are. I have tried with great zeal to express my thoughts and feelings through song and I have written several, but I know out of the 15 or songs that I have written only one will connect with people the way I had intended. I believe that it is the artist’s wish to connect with people, initially anyway, not to sell a million albums. Yes I know I should write better, but I'm doing the best with the tools god has given me.

I’m not saying that credit isn’t due to folks that put out spectacular albums. I just think that the people that do put out good albums have more in common, and relate better to those listeners who love those albums.

I don’t want to get shut out of hearing a great song because the album was not up to industry standards.

It looks cool, but it also looks like it has basically nothing to do with the original.

I didn't see the original, and I try to avoid reading scripts when I can, so I can't comment.

Oh yeah, I agree. Even writing one good song requires talent. And I enjoy a good pop hit as much as the next guy.

I just personally prefer to listen to artists who write albums that work as a cohesive whole, or at least fill an album with songs that are uniformly good.

I hope the way allofmp3 sell their music is the future, they'll encode it any way you want it: ogg, flac, cbr, vbr even wma. I can't see why the majors aren't releasing large chunks of their not so valuable content in this way

Since you bring up the songwriters perspective I figured I'd jump in here. I really like the idea of writing for an "album". One of the decisions I have to make when we finish the one we're working on is which song to put on a sampler that we're going to be on. It's very difficult because each song is so different to me and none of them alone say all that I'd like to communicate.

That's not to say, though, that there's something wrong with investing songwriting into one or two songs as opposed to a whole album; it's just my preference. I go to a songwriter's forum at my church where we discuss the songs we've written and give each other advise. Most of the other songwriters there have written hundreds of songs, where mine number in the dozens. This just simply doesn't compute to my because I invest so heavily into the few songs I've written, and I very rarely write a new song unless I have something new to say, both muscially and lyrically. So in that sense I totally understand where you're coming from.

Finally, just because some of us like the ideas of getting things in a "package" (which is what an album is) doesn't mean that it's going to stay that way. Once people get used to buying stuff online I'm pretty sure the current concept is going to go away. It's change and I'm not happy about it, but really the album will have outlived it's usefullness. Consider that grouping music together on albums is only a recent thing, given that people have been writing and performing music for ages. Before if an artist wanted to group a musical idea with other musical ideas he or she could package them together and call the ideas movements, but unrelated pieces were always seperable and could be pieced together however a performer wanted. I'm certain that pop music will follow in this vein once there is no compelling value reason to group musical thoughts into albums.

Change is inevitable; one day I'm sure we'll all be trying to explain to our children why playing a certain group of unrelated of music was important to us. I'm sure they'll understand the "Soul Cages", but "Moving Pictures" just won't make sense to them.

I may be stating the obvious since Napster is the only service I use. I can listen to at least part of any song. Some artists use 30 second clips until you buy, but they're in the minority. I pay the monthly fee to be able to listen and even download 90% of the 500,000 songs that Napster has available. In that sense I pay for music a lot like a I pay for cable. I pay for the music through my monthly fees and if they downloaded at a I higher quality I'd buy them that way. However I can record them at the same quality I could download them for and I don't see it being any different that taping Law & Order with my vcr.