How much of a classic album do you actually listen to? It turns out that even the most loftily-held LPs have a surprising number of tracks that modern listeners tend to skip en masse.
In the physical age, albums were often designed as – or, at least, presented as – a holistic and immersive experience. But listener data from Last.fm reveals that, in the streaming age, the widely-accepted classic albums are not always consumed in a linear manner.
What is an album – and why should we listen to all of it?
The album as we know it, as a physical entity at least, was developed by Columbia Records in 1948, debuting in both a 10” and a 12” format, both playing at 33⅓ rpm and the latter having a run time of around 23 minutes per side.
The artistic ideal of the album, however, did not arrive until the mid-1960s when acts like The Beatles, Bob Dylan and The Beach Boys began experimenting with the format to create a deeper and more cohesive creative statement – something quite different from the magnesium flare of the three-minute 7” single. By the 1970s, acts like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd were pushing the notion that singles were frivolous confections, and that LPs were the true artistic lodestar.
The modern streaming-driven democratisation of listening might expose an inconsistency in the listening experience – and reveal that even the most celebrated and venerated albums have at least one weak link: the skippable song.
Purple Reigns supreme
We selected a series of classic albums and blockbuster albums since the 1960s – the dawn of the album as a creative statement – and Last.fm provided listener data to to see just how complete the listening experience is – by looking at the disparity between the most-played (or “scrobbled” in Last.fm’s parlance) and least-scrobbled tracks.
Looking at the Last.fm data, Purple Rain emerged as the album that is most often listened to in totality, closely followed by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band … (fittingly as it is commonly seen as the first mainstream concept album).
Any large gap (or high ratio) means that users have a high tendency to only listen to the most popular track on an album. The listener ratio is especially useful here since it shows how many users have only listened to the most popular tracks on an album over an entire year. Purple Rain’s low ratio of 2.0, for instance, shows that the least popular track is listened to 50% as often as the album’s most popular track.
If we look at distinct listening rather than individual scrobbles, however, Sgt Pepper… beats out Purple Rain in terms of how many individual listeners listened to it in totality.
For more contemporary albums, some interesting data points and trends emerge. Dido’s No Angel (from 1999) is the album with the highest tendency towards individual track listening, with the highest ratio (5.72) of any album under analysis here. Ed Sheeran’s X was next (4.7), but this was not solely a characteristic of albums from the past quarter century as Rumours by Fleetwood Mac (4.3), Brothers In Arms by Dire Straits (4.25) and Michael Jackson’s Thriller (4.21) were not far behind.
Album tracks, hidden tracks, and weird tracks
What is most apparent when looking at the least-scrobbled tracks on an album, is that tracks tucked away towards the end or (most obviously on Sgt Pepper… and the Greatest Showman soundtrack) a reprise will get skipped or sit unplayed. Equally, when an extremely experimental track crops up on an album, that tends to engage listeners the least – most notably ‘Fitter Happier’ on OK Computer and ‘European Son’ on The Velvet Underground & Nico.
Even for albums that were intended to push sonic and creative boundaries, there is only so far the audience will travel with the artists. What does that tell us about the public willingness to go on a musical “journey” with an album?
“Not much, other than people would much rather listen to the singles – which isn’t surprising,” says Oliver Reynolds, software engineer at Last.fm. “Most scrobble clients only scrobble when 30 seconds of playback are reached, so it might be that many people are skipping the track after they realise it’s ‘that weird one’ – e.g. OK Computer’s ‘Fitter Happier’.”
Is the “album” a dying breed?
A presumption in the streaming and on-demand age might be that the idea of the album as a complete body of work is starting to feel increasingly archaic. Does this all suggest the classic album is something of a myth/misnomer in that they are not listened to from start to finish as intended by the artists who created them?
“I don’t think it’s a myth, especially when it comes to Sgt. Pepper… and Purple Rain,” argues Reynolds. “These have less than half the scrobble/listener ratio of Dido’s release – meaning that users are significantly more likely to listen in totality. I would consider these two as proper ‘classic albums’, and it’s interesting to note that none of the newer releases in our dataset come close.”
When looking at some of the most recent albums, released in an age when a few huge singles can theoretically skew the overall streaming performance of the parent album, one fascinating point emerges: acts like Adele, Dido, Norah Jones and Ed Sheeran have most-played/least-played ratios that are not wildly dissimilar to accepted classics of the 1960s and 1970s. Even albums made with digital listeners in mind can, it appears, still hold their own with the “golden era of vinyl” albums.
“There is indeed a general trend away from album-oriented listening with newer releases, but many of the post-2000 releases such as Back To Black perform better in this respect than some of the classics – such as Thriller,” says Reynolds. “I think it’s important to mention that genre and popularity of the release are a major factor here.”
He adds, “To my eyes, the more pop-oriented releases, like No Angel or X, tend to have more hits-based listening patterns, whereas more experimental, enthusiast-oriented releases, like OK Computer and Sgt Pepper…, tend to have more album-oriented listening. This pattern seems to hold regardless of when the album was released.”
The album vs the modern attention span
Perhaps it is partly down to listener impatience, but even the relatively short albums of the 1960s and 1970s – when albums barely ran over 45 minutes and long before the CD extended the potential play time to 74 minutes – do not always hold audiences’ full attention today.
Deeper and repeated listening might wed some to the body of work as a whole, but equally for others it might make it ringingly clear that some tracks were given a fleeting chance but thereafter trigger a judiciously swift pressing of the skip button.
Equally when compared to the albums of the past few decades, older classics do not always hold listeners for their duration and can have a bigger most-scrobbled/least-scrobbled disparity. The old ones, it seems, are not always the best.
