Bill, I’ll take yours first. Good point. I’m an iPod geek myself, and shuffle is both a blessing and a curse I suppose. But I also listen to dance music 99% of the time, and in dance, it’s extremely rare when an artist releases an album in the first place, let alone one worth listening to end-to-end. My article (the one you commented on) cited the sole example I can come-up with. But I acknowledge that dance is an anomaly in this regard. Everything does seem fast-faced, disposable, hurried these days.

Josh, interesting point about the snapshot. I wonder how true that is… In the past, and today? My sense is that with the way the music industry works today, and perhaps even in the past, it’s less about artist creativity and more about cranking out product that a record company hired producer feels will sell well. I don’t know.

One additional thought I had since that article was posted… An “epic” or “anthemic” album is a lot of work. As a budding music artist myself, one who works a regular job like so many in the dance industry, I have limited time to work on my music. Many dance artists produce one track, one song, per year. I’m rapidly starting to understand why. Unless you have the full-time basis to work on them, and maybe even if you do, there’s just a lot involved in making a song come together and work.

I’m not saying rock is easy in comparison, but as I think about a basic rock set-up… drums, guitar, bass, maybe a piano… the emphasis is on the songwriting. With dance, it’s not at all unusual for a producer to spend hours or days just picking the right bass sound and tweaking and adjusting that sound for the track. With rock, a bass is a bass is a bass.

Anyway, I digress. Whether it’s laziness, lack of time, the hurried nature of our society, the screwed-up state of the music industry, or something else, epic albums are not something we’re likely to see a whole lot of anymore in my view. I’m just glad somebody, somewhere, manages to produce them, sometimes.

But I feel the problem is deeper than that. I think it goes to the psychology behind todays culture. Everything is disposable. Shuffle play is the best example of why albums are struggling. People don’t want to spend the time to listen to an entire album at once. Information must be presented in 30 second sound bites. We no longer take the time to really listen.

I could go on, but my 30 seconds are up.