A few days ago, Dr. Geek expressed his disappointment with a sampler CD he�d purchased. The mix, he says, was largely ruined by the presence of one song that totally did not fit with the rest of the disk. My first thought was, �How irritating!� And my second, �Well, of course!�

The purpose of the sampler CD is not usually to create a fluid mix, but to sell more CDs. The idea is that you hear the songs and you will go out and buy the albums from which they came. Or they were before iTunes came along. In the interest of marketing, it pays for the audience member to consider each song individually, not as part of some kind of holistic sound space. To this end, it might be to the record company�s benefit to make the transitions between tracks a little disjunct. This is true with samplers across the board, regardless of genre � I have the same problem with a Hilliard Ensemble sampler I own, for example. The tracks don�t flow. But the CD is supposed to introduce me to the vast works of the ensemble, so that I might buy more of their albums. Because of this, I was able to get some great recordings of some great pieces for cheap � samplers are often inexpensive as well, due to their advertising function.

But in the age of iTunes, how effective is a sampler disk anyway? There is no guarantee that we�ll listen all the way through anyway. Just as we�ve learned � through remote control and Tivo � to circumvent television commercials, iTunes has enabled us to avoid listening to the songs we don�t like. We simply skip them. In the six years since iTunes was introduced, we have not only learned how to be our own DJs, but our own record producers.

This got me pondering, though, about the fate of the album, by which I mean the assembly of a selection of songs by a group into a coherent set. Because I am the blogosphere�s evolutionary equivalent of a dinosaur, I remember when CDs were first introduced. I grew up in the cassette tape era. My first independent musical purchase, in about the fourth grade, was a cassette copy of Abba�s Greatest Hits Volume I. I listened to it over and over on the boom box in my room. My family had a stereo with a record player that was used frequently, but I didn�t like to listen to my music in public spaces, so I liked the portability of cassettes. I also liked making my own. I taped things off the radio all the time. And since I was a kid without much allowance, I had to be enterprising. Every Sunday after church, I would help myself to one of the free giveaway cassette copies of the sermon (at this point we were Presbyterians, in case anyone�s been following the religious discussion around these parts). I kept them in a box in my closet and would tape over them with music. This was a particularly inspired (although not altogether ethical) move on my part. For in addition to being economical, it made it easy to be secretive about my musical habits. No one would suspect, for example, the soundtrack to Tommy was located on �Repent ye sinners� volumes one and two.

But commercial cassettes had a drawback � one shared with LPs: you had to turn them over. This interrupted the flow in a way that was often detrimental to one�s perception of the album. The cassette that caused the most problems for me in this regard was one I�d picked up in a bargain bin: The Alan Parsons� Project�s 1976 album �Tales of Mystery and Imagination.� This is a prog rock classic, both attractive and incredibly self-indulgent, based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. I was fascinated. But (and it�s possible I�m misremembering this), the cassette divided the orchestral suite �The Fall of the House of Usher� between sides. It was jarring. CDs changed all that � now you could listen uninterrupted. Surely this was the beginning of a new age of the concept album.

There have been scads of album-length works, and not just in the field of rock. John Coltrane�s �A Love Supreme� is an example of such a work from the field of jazz. They have never been the norm in a business that rides on the ranking of singles. But the concept album has persisted since the mid-late �60s.

To some extent the concept album is in the eye of the beholder � the concept is a perception of a particularly special unity in theme between the tracks of an album. I know a professor who occasionally teaches a course on the concept album who includes Liz Phair�s �Exile in Guyville� on his syllabus. That�s not one I�d personally define as a concept album, although I think a case can be made for it. Some � like �Tales of Mystery and Imagination � where their concepts on their sleeves.

This idea of the holistic album has always fascinated me, perhaps because since an early age I�ve loved the long forms of classical music. A good rock album could say as much as a symphony. The problem is that most albums don�t. And so we started skipping the tracks we don�t like. It was so much easier on CDs than it was on LPs or cassettes. No scraping needles, no setting of counters or just plain guessing how far to fast forward. Still, we kept cassettes because you couldn�t record on CDs. The dual technology made it possible to record mixes and the mix tape was born.

But iTunes has turned the tables again. With iTunes, the album has been all but dismantled. We shop by the song now. We set our players to random and we hear things out of order. If you�re listening to my iTunes, you will hear Frank Zappa next to The Shins followed by a Webern work followed by Stephane Grapelli and Django Reinhardt. I like the quirkiness of the random mixes. They somehow seem to be about me. It�s easy to be lulled into thinking of iTunes random as an expression of your subconscious.

But what of the long forms? iTunes is very had on classical music. For one thing, you can�t get enough information. You either get composer or performer, not both on a track in a system designed for the cult of the singer-songwriter. They seem to have trouble pricing classical music. Do you charge by the movement? Or by the piece? Most rock songs are of fairly similar lengths (although iTunes charges the same 99 cents for the 9 second horn fanfare to �The World at Large� on Modest Mouse�s �Good News for People Who Love Bad News as it does for the four-and-a-half-minute-long song). But a Mahler symphony might be three or four times as long as one by Salieri. How do you charge for that? By the hour? And while it is certainly possible to listen to iTunes by the album, it requires either organizing your playlist by album and setting it to play in order or setting up separate playlists for each album. It�s more work. And who want�s that?

The only band working today (that I know of � I�d love to know of others if you have any to recommend) that still seems dogmatically dedicated to the long form of the album is The Decemberists, whose last four albums have been long forms or concept albums, the latest of which (�The Crane Wife�) bears more than a passing resemblance in kind (and pure ego) to �Tales of Mystery and Imagination.� I bought my first Decemberists album (�Her Majesty The Decemberists�) on iTunes and mixed it into the shuffle. The result? I didn�t like The Decemberists as much as I had thought. Then, at Mr. Spy�s request, I made him a copy on CD. He played it a lot in the car. And you know what? I loved it. It�s totally different than hearing it song by song. It�s much better, much more interesting. Although the willfully arcane vocabulary will always irk me.

I wonder how long the practice of the concept album can hold out against technological forces that seem conspired against it. I feel a little sad about it. Like maybe I should be lighting a candle on the concept album�s behalf (or perhaps, more appropriately, standing in the dark and waiving a lighter in the air). Don�t get me wrong, I love being my own record producer. I love being able to compare versions of songs side by side, to line up influences and influences, or to program stream-of-conciousness. And I adore the instant gratification of iTunes, that I can hear a song on the radio and go home, download it, and hear it again five minutes later. But I miss listening to albums, straight through with no interruptions. I�m afraid the album may be a dying art.

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