That's not the question; the question is whether those parts will form a greater whole.
I'm not the original poster, so I speak only for myself. Some of my "albums" (read: CDs) are just collections of songs, and that's fine. But some of the albums have coherency, stylistic similarities that don't just come from the artist (as other albums from the same artist will have different stylistic similarities in those songs), and other things that make these albums a bit more than just the sum of their parts. This doesn't just include the "concept albums", but even things that may sound like "just a collection of songs" at first but turn out to have a flow and coherency once you think about it.
If nothing else, there's an art to album arrangement. Like good editing, it might be easier to see if I gave an example of a very degenerate case than if I try to say what's good: If you release 6 happy songs and 6 sad songs, you don't want them to show up in that order, as that makes for a terrible break in the flow (it'll feel like two albums glued together); you want to mix them together, and even with the same 12 songs, the tone of the album can be somewhat manipulated just by the order of the songs. (Start and end on happy? Start and end on sad? etc.)
It's not just a matter of "my choice"; there's a matter of the artist's choice as well. This is a very fuzzy thing and it is perfectly possible to create a "mix album" with a bit of work that is itself a bit more than the sum of its parts, but there's still something to be said for an artist doing this deliberately.
(Besides, call me old-fashioned but I think that there's still a place for the concept album. The short form gets mined out easily, especially in the context of a single artist; giving a bigger canvas to a skilled artist can produce something genuinely different.)
I hope that people continue to produce albums and not just single, isolated tracks. (Of course, albums too could be serialized. And maybe that's all you meant, but I still wanted to point out this could be a problem in this bright new era. I'm not prone to complaining about new media but this is one place we could genuinely lose an entire art form, not just be quibbling about the smell of the book or something else that nobody under the age of 10 will ever miss in the future (my personal metric of fuddy-duddy-ness when it comes to complaining about new media).)
I'm not the original poster, so I speak only for myself. Some of my "albums" (read: CDs) are just collections of songs, and that's fine. But some of the albums have coherency, stylistic similarities that don't just come from the artist (as other albums from the same artist will have different stylistic similarities in those songs), and other things that make these albums a bit more than just the sum of their parts. This doesn't just include the "concept albums", but even things that may sound like "just a collection of songs" at first but turn out to have a flow and coherency once you think about it.
If nothing else, there's an art to album arrangement. Like good editing, it might be easier to see if I gave an example of a very degenerate case than if I try to say what's good: If you release 6 happy songs and 6 sad songs, you don't want them to show up in that order, as that makes for a terrible break in the flow (it'll feel like two albums glued together); you want to mix them together, and even with the same 12 songs, the tone of the album can be somewhat manipulated just by the order of the songs. (Start and end on happy? Start and end on sad? etc.)
It's not just a matter of "my choice"; there's a matter of the artist's choice as well. This is a very fuzzy thing and it is perfectly possible to create a "mix album" with a bit of work that is itself a bit more than the sum of its parts, but there's still something to be said for an artist doing this deliberately.
(Besides, call me old-fashioned but I think that there's still a place for the concept album. The short form gets mined out easily, especially in the context of a single artist; giving a bigger canvas to a skilled artist can produce something genuinely different.)
I hope that people continue to produce albums and not just single, isolated tracks. (Of course, albums too could be serialized. And maybe that's all you meant, but I still wanted to point out this could be a problem in this bright new era. I'm not prone to complaining about new media but this is one place we could genuinely lose an entire art form, not just be quibbling about the smell of the book or something else that nobody under the age of 10 will ever miss in the future (my personal metric of fuddy-duddy-ness when it comes to complaining about new media).)