Album era
The album era was a period in popular music, usually defined as the mid-1960s through the middle of the 2000s decade, in which the album—a collection of songs issued on physical media—was the dominant form of recorded music expression and consumption. It was driven primarily by three storage formats: the 33⅓ rpm long-playing record, the cassette tape, and the compact disc. Rock musicians from the United States and the United Kingdom were often at the forefront of the era. The term "album era" is also used to refer to the marketing and aesthetic period surrounding a recording artist's release of an album.
Long-playing record albums, first released in 1948, offered the ability to sell larger amounts of music than singles. The album era arrived in earnest in the mid-1960s, when the Beatles began to release artistically ambitious and top-selling LPs. The industry embraced albums to immense success, and burgeoning rock criticism validated their cultural value. By the 1970s, the LP had emerged as a fundamental artistic unit and a widely popular item with young people. Some were concept albums, especially by progressive musicians in rock and soul.
During the 1980s, sales of LPs declined, thanks to the advent of the singles-oriented genres of punk rock and disco, and music videos on MTV. This threatened the profits of music companies, which responded over the next decades by releasing fewer singles and by raising the prices of albums released in the popular new CD format. 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 its own album-based standards. In the 1990s, the music industry saw an alternative rock and country music boom, leading to a revenue peak of $15 billion in 1999.
The rise of the Internet began to undermine the album. First, file sharing networks such as Napster enabled consumers to rip and illegally share their favorite tracks from CDs. In the early 21st century, music downloading and streaming services emerged as premier means of distributing music, album sales suffered a steep decline, and recording acts generally focused on singles, effectively ending the album era.
Pre-history
Technological developments in the early 20th century led to sweeping changes in the way recorded music was made and sold. Before the LP, the standard medium for recorded music had been the 78 rpm gramophone record, made from shellac and holding three to five minutes per side. The capacity limitations constrained the composing processes of recording artists, while the fragility of shellac prompted the packaging of these records in empty booklets resembling photo albums, with typically brown-colored wrapping paper as covers. The introduction of polyvinyl chloride in record production led to vinyl records, which played with less noise and more durability.In the 1940s the market for commercial- and home-use recordings was dominated by the competing RCA Victor and Columbia Records, whose chief engineer Peter Carl Goldmark pioneered the development of the 12-inch long play vinyl record. This format could hold recordings as long as 52 minutes, or 26 minutes per side, at a speed of 33⅓ rpm, and was playable with a small-tipped "microgroove" stylus designed for home playback systems. Introduced in 1948 by Columbia, LPs became known as "record albums", termed in reference to the photo album-like 78 packaging. Another innovation from Columbia was the addition of graphic and typographic design to album jacket covers, introduced by Alex Steinweiss, the label's art director. Encouraged by its positive effect on LP sales, the music industry adopted illustrated album covers as a standard by the 1950s.
Originally the album was primarily marketed for classical music listeners, and the first LP released was Mendelssohn: Concerto in E Minor for Violin and Orchestra Op. 64 by Nathan Milstein and the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York under Bruno Walter. Film soundtracks, Broadway show cast recordings, jazz musicians, and some pop singers such as Frank Sinatra soon used the new longer format. Jazz artists especially, such as Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Dave Brubeck, preferred the LP because it allowed them to record their compositions with concert-length arrangements and improvisations. The original Broadway cast recording of the musical Kiss Me, Kate sold 100,000 copies in its first month of release and, together with South Pacific, brought more attention to LPs, while the Broadway cast recording of My Fair Lady became the first LP to sell one million copies. However, in the 1950s and into the 1960s, 45 rpm seven-inch single sales were still considered the primary market for the music industry, and albums remained a secondary market. The careers of notable rock and roll performers such as Elvis Presley were driven primarily by single sales.
1960s: Beginnings in the rock era
Concept albums and ''Rubber Soul'' (1964–1966)
The arrival of the Beatles in the U.S. in 1964 is credited by music writers Ann Powers and Joel Whitburn as heralding the "classic album era" or "rock album era". In his Concise Dictionary of Popular Culture, Marcel Danesi comments that "the album became a key aspect of the countercultural movement of the 1960s, with its musical, aesthetic, and political themes. From this, the 'concept album' emerged, with the era being called the 'album era. According to media academic Roy Shuker, with the development of the concept album in the 1960s, "the album changed from a collection of heterogeneous songs into a narrative work with a single theme, in which individual songs segue into one another", "unified by a theme, which can be instrumental, compositional, narrative, or lyrical".Conversely, popular culture historian Jim Cullen says the concept album is "sometimes assumed to be a product of the rock era", with The A.V. Club writer Noel Murray arguing that Sinatra's 1950s LPs, such as In the Wee Small Hours, had pioneered the form earlier with their "thematically linked songs". 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. Some place the birth of the format even earlier, with journalist David Browne referring to Woody Guthrie's 1940 album Dust Bowl Ballads as "likely one of the first concept albums in music history".
The track listings on these antecedents, however, typically consisted of material that was not written by the artist. With their hot rod-themed 1963 release Little Deuce Coupe, the Beach Boys became the first act to release a concept album that consisted almost entirely of original songwriting. In his 2006 book American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3, academic Larry Starr credits the Beach Boys' 1964 concept albums Shut Down Volume 2 and All Summer Long with marking "the beginnings of... the increasing importance of album tracks, and eventually of albums themselves". Music journalist Gary Graff points to Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited as another possible starting point to the album era, as it constituted "a cohesive and conceptual body of work rather than just some hit singles... with filler tracks."
Danesi cites the Beatles' December 1965 release Rubber Soul as one of the era's first concept albums. According to music historian Bill Martin, Rubber Soul was the "turning point" for popular music, in that for the first time "the album rather than the song became the basic unit of artistic production." Author David Howard agrees, saying that "pop's stakes had been raised into the stratosphere" by Rubber Soul and that "suddenly, it was more about making a great album without filler than a great single." In January 1966, Billboard magazine referred to the opening sales of Rubber Soul in the US as proof of teenage record-buyers gravitating towards the LP format. While it was in keeping with the industry norm in the UK, the lack of a hit single on Rubber Soul added to the album's identity in the US as a self-contained artistic statement.
Following the Beatles' example, several rock albums intended as artistic statements were released in 1966, including the Rolling Stones' Aftermath, the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, the Beatles' own Revolver, and the Who's A Quick One. Music journalist Mat Snow cites these five releases, together with Otis Redding's 1965 LP Otis Blue, as evidence that "the album era was here, and though hit singles still mattered, they were no longer pop's most important money spinners and artistic statements." According to Jon Pareles, the music industry profited immensely and redefined its economic identity because of the era's rock musicians, who "started to see themselves as something more than suppliers of ephemeral hit singles". 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.
Post-''Sgt. Pepper'' (1967–1969)
The Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is identified by Rolling Stone assistant editor Andy Greene as marking "the beginning of the album era", a reference echoed by Scott Plagenhoef of Pitchfork; Greene adds that "it was the Big Bang of albums". Chuck Eddy refers to the "high album era" as beginning with Sgt. Pepper. Its release in May 1967 coincided with the emergence of dedicated rock criticism in the US and intellectuals seeking to position pop albums as valid cultural works. Music historian Simon Philo writes that, aside from the level of critical acclaim it received, "the record's success ushered in the era of album-oriented rock, radically reshaping how pop music worked economically." Reinforcing its creative ambition, Sgt. Pepper was packaged in a gatefold sleeve with a lyric sheet, typifying a trend whereby musicians now commissioned associates from the art world to design their LP sleeves and presented their albums to the record company for release. Greg Kot said Sgt. 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." Because of its cohesive musical aesthetic, it is often regarded as a concept album.Spearheaded by Sgt. Pepper, 1967 saw a greater output of artistically innovative and renowned rock albums from flourishing music scenes in both the US and the UK. These were often accompanied by popular singles and included the Stones' Between the Buttons, Cream's Disraeli Gears, and the Who's The Who Sell Out, which included hits like "I Can See for Miles" in the framework of a concept album satirizing commercialism and radio. Meanwhile, Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" was released as the "debut single of the Album Rock Era", according to Dave Marsh. Danesi cites the Beatles' 1968 White Album alongside Sgt. Pepper as part of the era's emergence. Shuker cites We're Only in It for the Money by the Mothers of Invention and Arthur, or Decline of the British Empire by the Kinks as subsequent concept albums, while noting a subset of the form in rock operas such as Pretty Things' S.F. Sorrow and the Who's Tommy.
According to Neil Strauss, the "album-rock era" began in the late 1960s and ultimately encompassed LP records by both rock and non-rock artists. According to Ron Wynn, the singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Isaac Hayes helped bring soul music into "the concept album era" with his 1969 album Hot Buttered Soul, which succeeded commercially and introduced more experimental structures and arrangements to the genre. Also among soul singers, Robert Christgau cites Redding as one of the genre's "few reliable long-form artists", as well as Aretha Franklin and her series of four "classic" LPs for Atlantic Records, from I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You to Aretha Now, which he says established an "aesthetic standard" of "rhythmic stomp and catchy songs". This series is compared by Christgau to similarly "prolific" runs from the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan in the same decade, as well as subsequent runs by Al Green and Parliament-Funkadelic. The Rolling Stones' four-album run beginning in the late 1960s with Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed – and concluding with Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St. – is also highly regarded, with the cultural historian Jack Hamilton calling it "one of the great sustained creative peaks in all of popular music".