Do you listen to single tracks or full albums? Options

[mipadi]

When listening to music, do you typically listen to single tracks, or the full (unshuffled album)? I get the feeling that most people listen to a playlist or shuffle their entire library, but I typically listen to a full album at a time. Good albums have cohesion, and I think it's hard -- jarring, even -- to just listen to a track at a time. Take Radiohead, for example: In Rainbows or OK Computer just fits together like a puzzle, and makes more sense when heard together. And I can't imagine listening to a single track from a Dream Theater album.

The flipside is that most mainstream albums consist of one or two good singles and 10-12 crappy songs, and have no cohesion whatsoever.

[libertie]

I prefer listening to entire albums also. I love when an artist releases an album with tracks that fit together so nicely in ONE specific order - at the end of a song, you start to hear the beginning of the next one in your head. Every once in a while I get a song stuck in my head and I'll want to listen to it, but most of the time I listen to music in my car when I have more than an hour's worth of driving. When I choose what music I want to listen to, I think of WHO rather than WHAT, meaning I'll pick out a certain artist that I want to hear and listen to a complete album by them.

[mipadi]

When I choose what music I want to listen to, I think of WHO rather than WHAT, meaning I'll pick out a certain artist that I want to hear and listen to a complete album by them.

Me, too. I rarely have a specific song in mind, just a specific artist. Which is why I think it's a shame that a lot of (mainstream) albums only contain 1 or 2 singles, and then a collection of shitty songs to round out the 11-14 track set.

I think I forgot to write this in the initial post, but this thread was partly prompted by a recent interview in which Radiohead said they weren't planning to release another LP anytime soon, because In Rainbows really took a lot of out them. They're going to stick to EPs for a while, because they don't have a "plan" for an entire album. And I think that's great -- I'd rather listen to a handful of songs that fit together (even if it's only a 1/2 hour or so of music) than an album that lacks any cohesion whatsoever.