Many different ways exist to listen to music, be it listening to the radio, CDs, vinyl albums, Pandora stations, listening to an assortment of your favorite singles on shuffle on your iPod, sitting down to listen to an artist’s entire discography or going to see live performances.  Lately, with the development of Spotify, listening to albums all the way through on digital devices became much easier and far cheaper, possibly providing resurgence for albums in popular culture.
    Most albums are works of art, created by artists, and so it follows that we should try to view the works of those artists in their intended format. Now that Spotify exists nobody has any excuse not to give a musician a chance to display his or her music since it is now inexspensive and easy to listen to a whole album.
   In the age of the $0.99 iTunes song, most people can afford to stock up on their favorite hit singles from the Internet, and people settle for just listening to singles. This removes listening to a whole album from common experience and eventually works to degrade the music industry and the experience of listening to a musician’s craft.
   Jose Cadena of California State Polytechnic University in Pomona said in an article for The Poly Post that the modern music industry developed focused around the notion of the album.
   “The way that the music industry has been set up for years revolves around an artist or band’s album as the focal point of their work. An album is expected to spawn singles, tours and social commentary that carve a musician’s artistry in the long-run,” Cadena said.  
    Consequently, with the ease of accessing popular hit singles, be it on YouTube, Rdio or a number of the other legal online sources, album sales suffer and the artistry of the album diminishes in the turmoil of today’s instant-gratification culture. Personally, I enjoy listening to an album from top to bottom, but I acknowledge it is often easy to lose interest, especially if the music changes to a slow pace or if it drones on without any change at all.  Some of my favorite albums are Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon,” Haken’s “Visions” and Boston’s “Third Stage,” mainly because these all keep my attention from start to finish.  
    Many rap and pop albums with well-known big hit singles are great apart from those hits, and listening to the hits in context even helps develop a greater appreciation by putting them in context of the artist’s larger work.  Take a chance, if you have not already, to listen to Kendrick Lamar’s certified platinum record “good kid, m.A.A.d city” all the way through. The egotism that may have originally stuck out in the single “Backseat Freestyle” takes on a different light when seen in the context of Lamar’s tale of growing up, insecure on the streets of his hometown in Compton, Calif.
   Martin Antoon, graduate of Loyola University in music industries studies and avid musician and producer, said in an email interview the music industry has changed recently.  Antoon noticed and warned the big shift is toward the now-prevalent focus on individual songs and away from albums.
   “The big difference now is that online music retailers (which now outnumber physical sales), such as iTunes, market songs as individual commodities rather than albums,” Antoon said. “You wouldn’t watch one scene in a movie and switch to another movie.  You wouldn’t read one chapter in a book and pick up another. Why listen to one song and switch completely to another?  Listening to an album in its entirety can be an incredibly immersive experience.  Why limit ourselves to missing out on it?”
    With the accessibility of music we have today there is no reason not to take the time to get to know an artist’s music, from his or her startup years to his or her most recent albums, and listen to more than just what is popular.  Give music a chance to grow on you in its intended form, and you may find listening to be a much more enjoyable experience than before.