Is Streaming killing the album?

On Friday 10th March 2016, Ed Sheeran broke a UK chart record that I can see being broken for a long time - He landed 16 songs in the Official Singles chart Top 20 and 9 in the top 10. While this exposes a massive flaw with the 'Singles' chart, this is far from the first time it's happened. Starting off with Justin Bieber's 'Purpose' in late 2015, numerous albums have had 10 or more songs all debut on national charts at once, namely Beyonce with 'Lemonade' (The best album which this has happened to thus far), Drake with 'Views' and the Weeknd with 'Starboy'. It's got to the point where even mildly hyped albums such as Future's two new projects have 3 or 4 new songs entering the chart at once each. 

So why does this happen? The main reason is streaming charts, and that when an album is streamed a stream is given to each individual track - as opposed to buying an album in itunes where purchasing a full LP won't count as one individual sale of each song on the LP. This in itself isn't necessarily bad - It makes sense and allows new fans to discover which deep cuts from artists are the best ones as these usually have more plays - but the problem comes when these are factored into charts. Obviously if no massive singles have been released for say a month and then an artist like Ed Sheeran releases an album onto streaming services, almost every track will be streamed enough to make the top 50 chart. In the case of 'Divide' the top 15 spots on the UK Spotify chart all belong to him (With one song at 17). This may be accurate to what the UK is listening to, but surely there should be a limit on what songs are considered 'Singles' by the UK and US charts?

Anyway, that's a different point which isn't as important as what I perceive to be the slow death of the album as any kind of cohesive project. I want to quickly pre-face this by saying OBVIOUSLY a very large number of artists still make cohesive, trimmed and generally great albums. The problem is that an increasing number of very prominent artists are seemingly creating what amount to giant song-dumps with a name and cover. An album being long is one thing, but this isn't 'To Pimp a Butterfly' or 'Teens of Denial' we're talking about here. 'Views', 'Starboy' and 'Divide' all suffer from the same basic problem which likely wouldn't have happened if these albums weren't made to benefit from streaming - they are all an hour or more long, which is waaaaaay too long for albums with very little experimentation or subtlety. 

What makes long albums like 'To Pimp A Butterfly' so easy to get through is that every song is drastically different and also great - you can't point to two songs on the album that you get mixed up with each other as every track is about a different but related topic and uses a different palette of instrumentation. What makes albums like 'Divide' and 'Views' so hard to get through is that only one or two of the songs are particularly good and there's way more rubbish and filler either way. On 'Divide' specifically, there are at least 7 sappy ballads, none of which are above a 5/10 for me.

The reason artists do this is that it on Spotify having more tracks means people are listening for longer, therefore making more revenue for the artists and their labels. This is also why there's been a larger than ever number of trap artists who can crank out 4 15-track mixtapes a year, and why so many rock artists seem to be complaining or struggling, as these bands tend to spend 2-3 years crafting what they hope will be classic albums. Already, albums like '24k Magik' by Bruno Mars which are fairly standard, trimmed albums seem an oddity. When critics start praising a pop album for being under 50 minutes long you know somethings up. This doesn't necessarily reflect quality, but it does show how the album as a thought-out collection of songs designed to go well together may be on it's way out.