Do we need albums?

[Trepie]

Just wanted to put this out there and see what people are thinking.

 

For music storage do we still need albums in 2021?

Now I get it, artists absolutely do.  I'm not talking from a music creation standpoint.

If their vision is x number of tracks played 1 after the other in a certain order then more power to them. 

 

 

For a lot of artists though I will grab only a handfull of tracks, so it seems silly to have an album sub-folder and list it in my music manager.

I have been experimenting and taking my music out of album sub-folders and just concentrating on a master list of tracks per artist I collect.

In the few instances where I do listen to an album on it's own, I create a playlist.

 

It has so far solved a few OCD issues for me.

• Region differences
  • Do you collect all versions
  • Do you just have a few subfolders containing the differentiated tracks
  • Do you collate into a master version of the album
• Re-releases
  • Same deal as above?  How do you deal with re-releases containing new\bonus tracks?
• Soundtracks\Various Artists
  • I've never liked having a 'various artists' folder in my music collection.  Don't need that anymore

 

The only issue I have hit so far is with game soundtracks where an artists will do variations of the same title many times over a franchise but my naming convention fixed that for me

• Prelude [Final Fantasy 7]
• Prelude [Final Fantasy 8]
• etc...

Ultimately I've ended up with a cleaner folder structure and less duplication.

Seems to be going OK for now.

 

Does anyone else have these frustrations or am I a crazy person?  

 

 

 

[faeran]

I think if you come from decades of listening to music on albums, it's hard to break that habit, and you gravitate towards that kind of organization.

If you take that history away, I can see where an "album" could be more of a label you assign to a song, and you could label a song with multiple "albums", sort of like you are doing with playlists.