You’re totally right that people skipped around on CDs, especially in the mid-to-late 90s when everybody was putting out bloated 80-minute albums. (I think 21st century artists should be commended for not expanding runtimes in accordance with new technology’s carrying capacity, as literally every generation of recording artists before them did.) But I think the conversation is less about whether people are listening to albums all the way through, and more about whether albums still exist as part of a shared public consciousness.

In the comments of your last article, we were talking about Jagged Little Pill, which was completely embedded in popular culture for two full years after its release, to the point that dudes like you and I can pontificate about it two decades later. The singles were everywhere, Alanis’s face was everywhere, and people made “Ironic” jokes to strangers and could be confident they would be understood. I’m not sure that sort of shared experience exists anymore in the highly balkanized online media landscape. There are still big singles, but there are not massively popular albums that everybody owns and recognizes as a reference point. What is 2016’s Thriller? or Rumours? or even Californication? In this sense, the album seems to have faded quickly in the past few years.

In the early 00s, I was at a bar in Belgium and the entirety of Turn On The Bright Lights was playing. Everyone seemed to know it and it was well suited to the environment. For all the nerding out about indie music on Pitchfork and Stereogum, I don’t hear that happening with the new album from Tame Impala or whoever. And for all the column inches given to Kanye West, I have never heard “Ultralight Beam” or “Bound 2” in public; all non-blog discussion of Kanye is entirely TMZ material.

Maybe I’m just old and not spending enough time in bars anymore. But I never hear albums playing anywhere, or even more than one or two singles from a “big” album, or even anyone even talking about albums beyond saying “that new ______ album is great”. Am I off base?