[MadhattanJack]

I've been seeing a few more "Death of the Album" pieces on news websites and blogs lately. On NPR.com today, a new one popped up entitled "Why don't artists let their albums breathe?"

I thought it might be a story about recording artists who try to choke and strangle their own albums (usually with duct tape or old rubber bands), because I've been hearing some rather alarming rumors about this too, but no, it's just another "Death of the Album" opinion piece based on recent trends in the music biz which are, in turn, mostly driven by streaming. In this case, the piece's author notices that some artists are releasing "multi-part" albums that aren't really mutli-part at all, they're just a way to get more streams by piggybacking on the success of the artist's previous album, as if you have to listen to "Part II" of that album now to get the "full experience." (Also, artists are taking advantage of the way the streaming services pay out by overloading their albums with lots of tracks, in the hopes that the listener will fall asleep during the album and just let the whole thing keep playing.)

It doesn't seem like any of the existing subforums are really appropriate for threads announcing and/or discussing these kinds of opinion pieces — it's like of a "meta" thing so it didn't seem right to throw it into the "Music" subforum with everything else, and it's on-topic so it didn't seem to belong in the "lounge" either. And maybe nobody wants to discuss "meta" topics at all, that's always a possibility. Anyway, I thought I'd run it up the ol' flagpole here, and see if anybody salutes. 🤔

[Romanelli]

For me, this is actually what the music forum should have. Discussions about what is happening in the world of albums. That's CONTENT, baby! I say music forum. All the way!
_________________
I'm leaning on the threshold
Of her mystery
And crashing through the walls
Of dying history

[MadhattanJack]

[CA Dreamin]

I agree with Romanelli this totally belongs in the Music Section. In fact, we used to actually have threads in the music section about these types of topics, a long time ago, pre-pandemic. But like MadhattanJack said, in today's BEA climate, this would go unnoticed in the music section and buried before anyone saw it. I admittedly wouldn't have seen it because I rarely bother clicking on the Music Section anymore. And yes, it's entirely because of AOTD, COTD, and "what are you ___ing right now?" threads that choke out what could be interesting topics. I've already been outvoted that all "what are you ___ing" threads should be erased and banned. But here's another controversial take. Get rid of AOTD and COTD too, and move whatever "what are you ___ing" threads AM decides to salvage to their own designated section. Start the music section over from scratch, to allow space for a topic like this. Let the music section be about music, not a perpetual barrage of IG stories.

[albummaster]

At the moment, the forums are already spread over quite a few (inactive) areas. The forum structure worked better when the site was busier, but right now, conversation is being spread very thinly. I agree that the Music forum itself has mostly become crowded by AOTD and COTD posts (impossible to deny it), but not sure why that should stop other people posting (the fact the Music forum is crowded by those posts simply means nobody else is posting anything there). I'd love for the Music forum to contain exactly the type of content MJ is proposing, it's a failure of the site that people don't feel comfortable posting Music related content in what should be the main forum. Perhaps the forum description is too restrictive(?), but that's simple enough to change.

The Music Diaries are probably the most active area of the forums right now (without going into specific stats), but I think it has cannibalised content (to a certain extent) that might otherwise have been posted (or repurposed) into the Music forum (there's quite a broad range of content being posted in the diaries, and a lot of it is extremely high quality).

The ___ right now? threads have largely been eliminated, but this has definitely resulted in less overall forum activity (forums still readjusting from the impact). There's previously been open discussion here about moving AoTD posts into their own area, but if the site is very quiet, they are sometimes the only thing going on in the Music forum (which is the main reason they exist in the first place). Perhaps the site could experiment by moving these posts somewhere else, to see if anything else takes up the vacuum (but again that will just spread the forums out even more, when I personally feel things need to be more compact to make things appear more active), but happy to try it out if that would help things.

[CA Dreamin]

[Hayden]

[albummaster]

[MadhattanJack]

[albummaster]