Album era

The album era (sometimes, album-rock era) was a period in popular music, usually defined as the mid-1960s through the mid-2000s, in which the album—a collection of songs issued on physical media—was the dominant form of recorded music expression and consumption. It was driven primarily by three storage formats: the 33⅓ rpm long-playing record (LP), the cassette tape, and the compact disc (CD). Rock musicians from the US and UK were often at the forefront of the era. The term "album era" is also used to refer to the marketing and aesthetic period surrounding a recording artist's release of an album.

Long-playing record albums, first released in 1948, offered the ability to sell larger amounts of music than singles. The album era arrived in earnest in the mid-1960s, when the Beatles began to release artistically ambitious and top-selling LPs. The industry embraced albums to immense success, and burgeoning rock criticism validated their cultural value. By the 1970s, the LP had emerged as a fundamental artistic unit and a widely popular item with young people. Some were concept albums, especially by progressive musicians in rock and soul.

As the 1970s became the 1980s, sales of LPs declined, thanks to the advent of the singles-oriented genres of punk rock and disco and the advent of music videos on MTV. This threatened the profits of music companies, which responded over the next decades by releasing fewer singles and by raising the prices of albums released in the popular new CD format. The success of major pop stars led to the development of an extended rollout model among record labels: marketing an album around a catchy lead single, an attention-grabbing music video, novel merchandise, media coverage, and a supporting concert tour. Women and black musicians continued to gain critical recognition among the album era's predominantly white-male and rock-oriented canon, with the burgeoning hip hop genre developing its own album-based standards. In the 1990s, the music industry saw an alternative rock and country music boom, leading to a revenue peak of $15 billion in 1999 (based on CD sales).

The rise of the Internet began to undermine the album. First, file sharing networks such as Napster enabled consumers to illegally rip and share their favorite tracks from CDs. In the early 21st century, music downloading and streaming services emerged as premier means of distributing music, album sales suffered a steep decline, and recording acts generally focused on singles, effectively ending the album era.