Album era
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.
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.
[15] 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.
[28] In the case of the British music industry, the commercial success of Rubber Soul and Aftermath foiled attempts to re-establish the LP market as the domain of wealthier, adult record-buyers.
From early 1966, record companies there ceased their policy of promoting adult-oriented entertainers over rock acts, and embraced budget albums for their lower-selling artists to cater to the increased demand for LPs.
Pepper introduced a template for both producing album-oriented rock and consuming it, "with listeners no longer twisting the night away to an assortment of three-minute singles, but losing themselves in a succession of 20-minute album sides, taking a journey led by the artist.
[12] Shuker cites We're Only in It for the Money (1967) by the Mothers of Invention and Arthur, or Decline of the British Empire (1969) by the Kinks as subsequent concept albums, while noting a subset of the form in rock operas such as Pretty Things' S.F.
[40] The Rolling Stones' four-album run beginning in the late 1960s with Beggars Banquet (1968) and Let It Bleed (1969) – and concluding with Sticky Fingers (1971) and Exile on Main St. (1972) – is also highly regarded, with the cultural historian Jack Hamilton calling it "one of the great sustained creative peaks in all of popular music".
[47] Under Berry Gordy's leadership at the soul label Motown, the singer-songwriters Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder were given creative control to approach their albums more seriously in what had generally been a single-focused genre, leading to a series of innovative LPs from the two as the decade ensued.
"[52] In comparison to future generations, Campion explains that people growing up in the 1970s found greater value in album listening, in part because of their limited access to any other home entertainment appliance: "Many of them were unable to control the family television or even the kitchen radio.
Campion describes this setting as an "imagination capsule" for the era's listeners, who "locked away inside the headphone dreamscape, studying every corner of the 12-inch artwork and delving deeper into lyrical subtext, whether in ways intended by the artist or not".
Other cultural influences of the time also informed the listening experiences, according to Campion, who cites the horror and science fiction fantasies and imagery of comic books, as well as advertising, propaganda, and "the American promise of grandeur".
Citing the disappointing receptions of Elton John's Blue Moves (1976) and Fleetwood Mac's Tusk (1979), Restall says, "[These] are dramatic examples of how the recording artists of the great album era ... suffered the receiving end of a horizon of expectations.
"Over time, there became an unspoken (and, eventually, baked into the budget) checklist to releasing a major-label pop album", writes Vulture journalist Justin Curto, who cites elements in this model to be an upbeat lead single, an attention-grabbing music video, press coverage, novel merchandise, and the announcement of a supporting concert tour.
Starting with the May 1986 release of Run-DMC's Raising Hell, which sold more than three million copies, these included the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill (1986), Boogie Down Productions' Criminal Minded (1987), Public Enemy's Yo!
[37] In 1987, the reissue of the Beatles' complete studio catalog was especially popular among consumers from the baby boomer generation, who were also the target audience of two classic-rock films – the Chuck Berry tribute Hail!
In her account of the 1980s hip hop crate-diggers, media and culture theorist Elodie A. Roy writes, "As they trailed second-hand shops and car boot sales – depositories of unwanted capitalist surplus – diggers were bound to encounter realms of mainstream, mass-produced LP records now fallen out of grace and fashion."
This development also contributed to the phenomenon of the "popular collector", which material culture scholar Paul Martin describes as those generally interested in "obtainable, affordable and appealing" items – such as music releases – and attributes to mass production.
In it, he argued that the LP had "been made obsolete by MP3 downloads, movie soundtracks and CD shufflers – not to mention video games, cable television, the Internet and the worldwide explosion of media that prey upon the attention spans of what used to be known as album buyers.
According to Nielsen SoundScan's data for 2004, digital tracks had sold more than 140 million copies at around 99 cents each from online vendors like iTunes, indicating that consumers preferred to download individual songs over the higher-priced album in its entirety.
[78] Also by this time, dance-pop had succeeded urban music as the dominant genre on top 40 radio,[76] with pop artists like Rihanna emerging during this period basing their careers on digital singles instead of album sales.
[83] Capitol-EMI's COO Jeff Kempler said in 2007 that fewer artists will pursue album-oriented campaigns, while media researcher Aram Sinnreich bluntly predicted the album's death with consumers listening to playlists on their MP3 players instead.
[91] Albums were marketed in extravagant, performance art-like product launches that reached "a nadir" in 2013, according to Vulture writer Lindsay Zoladz, who cites the failed attempts of acts such as Kanye West, Arcade Fire, and Lady Gaga at using visual art and public settings in the strategy: "Gaga's comically excessive ARTPOP campaign featured a Jeff Koons sculpture and a press conference in which she unveiled 'VOLANTIS, the world's first flying dress'; Daft Punk recorded endless VH1 Classic Albums–esque promotional spots that memorialized Random Access Memories before anybody had even heard it ... and then who could forget [Perry] driving through the streets of L.A. in a gilded 18-wheeler that screamed KATY PERRY PRISM 10-22-13 and looked, uncannily, like a ten-ton brick of Cracker Barrel cheese?
In her observation, many recording artists had revitalized the concept album around autobiographical narratives and personal themes, such as intimacy, intersectionality, African-American life, boundaries among women, and grief associated with death.
Elaborating on this point, Los Angeles Times critic Mikael Wood said, "Yet as she kept her music off Spotify – conditioning her loyal audience to think of buying her songs and albums as an act of devotion – younger artists like Ariana Grande emerged to establish themselves as streaming favorites."
The report also observed a shift away from the global dominance of popular English-language acts and toward regional successes with cross-cultural appeal, such as BTS and J Balvin, due in part to a more open-minded consumer culture and social connectivity between artists and listeners.
Taylor Swift surprise-released her albums Folklore and Evermore in July and December 2020, respectively, abandoning a proper rollout campaign for the first time in her career, and setting several sales and streaming records.
[102] Reporting on music release trends during the pandemic, writers observed that they offered a greater connectivity for artists with their listeners during a paradigm-shifting period while empowering both groups at the expense of major labels.
[103] In 2022, Michael Cragg wrote a piece for i-D magazine in which he questioned whether Swift was "our last remaining real popstar", noting her ability to combine traditional methods of marketing pop music, such as album-based metanarratives and massive concert tours, with contemporary tactics, such as abstaining from releasing songs ahead of the album.
