''Younger listeners don't listen through an album,'' said Val Azzoli, the co-chairman of the Atlantic Group. With a few clicks, multitudes of more casual listeners sift through the songs on their hard drives, burning their own compilations onto homemade CD's or creating playlists for their Ipods or the software players on their computers.Įven within an album, the programming features of CD's have long allowed listeners to skip or shuffle songs at whim. But mix-tape methodology is now everywhere. In the 1980's heyday of the cassette, many dedicated music fans made mix tapes, spending hours choosing just the right succession of songs and taping them one by one. With so many unattached songs to choose from, listeners are becoming disc jockeys, or perhaps file jockeys. And then there are the millions of unauthorized copies of songs bouncing around the Internet on networks like KaZaA, which continue to flourish despite the Recording Industry Association of America's threats to sue users. Subscription services like Pressplay, MusicNet and Rhapsody also offer individual songs. With less hoopla, music retailers like Amazon and Tower Records are already selling individual songs to be downloaded, dismantling the albums they came from. Its competition, Buy.com's, is expected to announce its opening on Tuesday, selling downloads for the much more widely used Windows operating system. Apple recently announced that 6.5 million songs have been downloaded since the store opened on April 28, fewer than half of them as part of albums. That question has been raised more insistently since Apple Computers started its iTunes store, where songs can be downloaded for 99 cents and complete albums for $9.99. But can the notion of an album - a collection of songs sold as a single unit, to be heard in a certain sequence - survive the Internet? THE pop album made its way through the 20th century by staying adaptable, transforming itself from analog grooves to digital bits.
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