The inevitable death of the Album?

I've noticed this for a while, and maybe a lot of other people have to, but when I check other people's playlists on last.fm they seem to just have their music players on random. Actually, I also notice sometimes that they have them on repeat as well, but what's missing here is playing through an album. Now there are a couple of factors at play here that explain why people are straying from the album format. First of all, having a music player on random is essentially a personal radio station. And/or maybe this is part of a general movement away from the album format and back to the single format.

I can attest to how nice it is to surrender all decision making responsibilities to the algorithms of a software program. Plus there are the little surprises you get from having a song you haven't heard for a while come up. But what is lost when people ignore the album is the sense of continuity that is sometimes (not often enough if you ask me) at the heart of a record. You are basically eschewing the band's choice of songs and song order and handing the power to a cold digital process by which your playlist is chosen.

On the topic of a general return to the dominance of the single, we don't have the mp3 player to fault but instead the downloading software, especially those that specialize in individual songs. That basically exempts the vast majority of bittorrent downloads. Whether you get your music from a free p2p program or through a pay by the download one, you can cut through the flab of worthless, forgettable songs that occasionally characterize the space between singles on countless albums (most of which are of course single-focused for the sake of radio airplay to begin with). This is why I was absolutely baffled when Christina Aguilera released a double album recently. It will inevitably have more throwaway songs and be a waste of money for her and her label since so many more people can buy only the singles at a tiny fraction of the album's cost. I could care less about what kind of money Christina Aguilera and her backers make, but what I'm truly worried about is that this practice of downloading only fragments of an album might spill over into more album friendly (frequently indie)genres and begin to trivialize those types of albums as well.

With both factors at play, the album format might not have (as much of) a prominent role in how people listen to music in the coming years.