Until about the middle of the 1960s, albums (hey, what a concept, for you Gen Z people, an album was a collection of songs on a so-called long-playing record, for short LP, in contrast to single songs on records called - aptly - singles) were just collections of singles. One song, taking three to four minutes, after the other. Sometimes shorter, seldomly longer, and artists/groups usually just collected single songs to a certain length to fill just such a record.

What is a concept album?

While there is no clear definition, it is generally accepted that a concept album is a collection of songs that share a common basic idea and set that basic idea into different musical pieces, often even telling kind of a story.

There were some great concept albums, sometimes they even called them rock operas. The Beatles nearly got it with Seargant Pepper, and the really big ones were (in my opinion of course) Pink Floyd’s Animals and The Wall (the others don’t fit the concept album description very well, sorry, not even Dark Side of the Moon, although they nicely connect the beginning to the end there), Queensrÿche’s Operation Mindcrime, Alice Cooper’s Alice Goes to Hell, Jeff Lynne’s War of the Worlds (that one’s a given).

And coincidentally I write this while I listen to Freudiana, a cooperation of several artists under the lead of Eric Woolfson and Alan Parsons.

But why are they dying?

The demise of the concept album is based on two effects at work in popular music these days. The first is that the music industry has just about destroyed the concept of an album (heh, get it?) by making single songs the be-all and end-all of their production. In a way it is a regression to the early sixties when a record was always a single, with an A-side containing the “hit” (or what the record label wanted to be the hit), and a B-side containing filler or an older hit. In the age of streaming, the connection of songs has become a virtual one, and if you have listened to even one of the records I mentioned above you’ll probably know where I’m going with this. Because no playlist creator or AI will connect these often wildly different songs with one another, and certainly not in the same order as the concept album, where the songs often went over into the next song (even Dark Side of the Moon does that). So in essence, the concept album is dead because people’s attention span has changed (or, if you want to believe the conspiracy theorists, has been changed).

The second one is AI (or rather, “AI”). Because AI will never use a basic idea an connect songs like (for example) Another Brick in the Wall and One of my Turns with Comfortably Numb. Although, if you listened to The Wall you’d know these songs have their place and are clearly part of the concept of this psychological wall-building the protagonist (which is at least a bit based on Roger Waters himself) is building around himself.

It’s just another thing AI just can’t do, and you won’t convince me otherwise. Art, and music, is something so deeply human and so connected to human emotions that it will always be impossible for a machine to emulate that, even if they can get close. Read up on the Uncanny Valley if you don’t believe me.

Oh, and you can see that concept albums have been dying for quite some time already, because all newer ones have been made by either artists from the past (like Eric Woolfson and Alan Parsons, sorry) or artists reliving the past. So while I’d welcome concept albums because I like the style and idea of them, I think there will be few and with long pauses inbetween them.