why make an album?
I probably spent too much time thinking about what the first post of this blog should be.
Coding out this new website ultimately got me reflecting on how websites, particularly in their function, have changed. At some point, they became advertisements. I don’t think this is some grumpy, old-person-yells-at-cloud stuff, either: The internet was truly less commodified twenty-five to thirty years ago.
Discovering this community of hand-coded webpages reminded me that a webpage could also be about a specific interest or the documenting of a certain project. With this realization, I decided the blog portion of the site could be about the making of the new best hit tv record.
So, for this blog, I thought it would be interesting to write about a conversation I’ve had with a lot of my friends who are also making music in 2025:
“Why make an album?”
The short answer is, probably, “don’t.”
It’s not that I don’t love albums. I am, no joke, writing this right now with Yaz’s Upstairs at Eric’s on the turntable. As much as I love curating an hours-long vibe playlist for myself and hitting shuffle, I try to make time to throw on records from start to finish. And I know I’m not alone.
But, if you’re making music in 2025 with any aspiration for breaking through The Algorithm™, it behooves you to go one song at a time, releasing them as you finish them, each a fresh piece of content for the timeline or that week’s playlist.
Twenty years ago, albums could simply be bookends of a few years for a band or artist. You would write songs in batches, head into the studio, record/mix/master the collection, and then release them. The media (tapes, CDs, etc.) and the business around it were one cohesive thing.
Obviously, that’s changed now and, unless you’re someone like Taylor Swift who can commodify your albums by releasing many different versions, the album stands largely outside of the ways music is consumed.
But, at the risk of being self-contrarian, my long answer is, basically, “all of this is why you should make an album.” If you are going to make an album in 2025, though, being really intentional about your vision and process makes the whole enterprise more rewarding for everyone involved.
Without intentionality for your vision and process, you’ll have just a collection of songs that could’ve served you and your audience better as a series of singles.
I was having this conversation with a friend of mine when I was reminded of this time in Paris. I was traveling with another friend of mine who worked professionally as a baker. We spent a week eating bread during the day and checking out music venues at night.
One day, eating bread along a canal in the 10th arrondissement, my friend asked me if I knew what the bakery’s name, “Du Pain et des Idées,” translated to.
The answer, which I was still too jet-lagged to even consider was, “Bread and Ideas About It.”
Something about that name’s exceptional French-ness has always stuck with me, but I don’t think I really considered how it informed my views of music until I started really thinking about the role of the album in 2025.
But my idea is this: If you have a collection of songs, then you have a series of singles. But, if you have songs and ideas about them, that’s an album.
Because, ultimately, The Algorithm™ doesn’t care if you’ve spent one week on a track or four years on a record. It will give your post about either the same amount of space in the timeline. So, if you’re intentional enough to have some ideas about why these songs in particular go together, the process takes on a whole new dimension outside of the commodification of your art.
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