Pop stars are all about albums

To Billie Eilish, things like cassettes and CDs probably seem charmingly retro. Born in 2001, the musician was six years old when Spotify launched; today she is the fourth-most popular artist on the platform. Ms Eilish has only ever known 21st-century listening habits. And yet she has emerged as an unlikely champion of a time-worn format: the album. She declared that her new record, “Hit Me Hard and Soft”, released in May, was a “cohesive” piece of work, “ideally listened to in its entirety from beginning to end”. No singles were released in advance as amuse-bouches for famished fans.

She is not the only hitmaker emphasising the album rather than its component parts. Ariana Grande advertised “Eternal Sunshine”, released in March, with just one single, stressing that she wanted listeners to “experience the album in full this time”. Dua Lipa’s debut album in 2017 was preceded by six singles; she scaled back for her latest record. And Taylor Swift has issued four successive sets of new material with no advance singles. Two of these were “surprise releases”, announced just ahead of their arrival, which again emphasises the primacy of the album format.

For decades after the birth of recorded music in the 1920s, the single was the only thing that mattered, mostly because it was the only thing there was: early gramophone records could hold just a few minutes of music on each side. As technology improved, playing times increased, and groups such as t he Beatles came to see LPs (“long play”) as statements of ambition. From the mid-1960s onwards, albums became something to be appreciated as complete works of art. In 1988 Prince released his “Lovesexy” album on CD as one continuous track, with the explicit goal of making it impossible to cherry-pick songs.

No doubt Ms Eilish and co want to prove their serious musical chops. Pop music is still often regarded as ephemeral, because it relies on catchy tracks that can dominate airwaves and charts. Singles account for around 65% of a hit rock album’s total “consumption” (including streaming as well as physical purchases). For a pop album that figure rises to 85%.

This crop of pop stars has discovered that a deluge can be better than a drip-feed. Stars can encourage fans to buy their record on vinyl and stream the album, too. As a result, “The artist and their label partner earn twice,” says Chris Cooke of CMU, a music-industry website. And, by releasing the songs all at once, artists enjoy the kind of chart dominance that sporadic singles do not provide. Ms Eilish currently has three tracks in the Billboard top 20. After the release of “The Tortured Poets Department”, Ms Swift claimed the top 14 spots. Singles are still useful for pop’s aspiring princesses, but not the queens.

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