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.

[sixfive]

I can listen to Dream Theater singles. Well, I could. I was really into them, but I saw them live a couple years ago and it killed it a bit for me :( I can still listen to some songs like change of seasons or pull me under on their own.

Anyway, I tend to find songs I like, torrent the album, and give it a shot. That's a whole lot more miss than hit though with the genres I listen to, though. Trance has a lot of good singles and a lot less good albums. Stuff like Pink Floyd, though, I have to listen to albums, or at least 2-3 songs linked together.

[heyo-captain-jac...]

Single tracks. Trance/techno doesn't really have any good albums, and songs usually don't make any sense together anyway.

[batman]

One of my friends in high school was always super anal about listening to an entire album. Something about "you lose the essence of the music" if you only listen to single tracks or "you can only understand what the artist is trying to say" by listening to the whole album.

[Joanne]

I tend to find songs I like, torrent the album, and give it a shot.

This. But I usually listen to my music on shuffle, unless I am in the mood for just one artist. In that case, I would listen to the entire albums.

[smash]

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.

i do both. it depends on the album. i get what you're saying about songs that just fit together like puzzle pieces. i have a few albums like that. whether i shuffle albums/songs/artists depends on my mood. i just go by whatever or whoever i feel like listening to at the time.

[transcendentalis...]

Mostly entire albums... if it's pop, then I'll just leave it on shuffle.

[Gigi]

When I'm really bored and I'm just listening to music to fill up some space, I'll use shuffle.

But when I want to REALLY listen to music, I want to listen to it in its intended glorious full album state. Unfortunately, there are only a few albums that I would ever want to do that with though (most albums these days have 2-3 singles and you feel like the rest of the LP is there to fill the album with crap). And even if the songs are all pretty good, most bands suffer from having songs that sound incredibly alike (e.g. Franz Ferdinand).

I don't do listen to albums often though, since it usually requires a good bit of effort, so you can't be doing homework at the same time...which is my other gripe, that most music listeners these days do it sort of passively, without thought, as a silence filler.

For me it would also be Radiohead's OK Computer and In Rainbows. Also, Kid A, and Sufjan Stevens' Illinois. Yes, (most of) the individual songs are brilliant, but the full albums are considerably better. Like you said, the album heard in its entirety allows you to sort of grasp its central theme and use that new understanding to discover something new about songs you've already loved. There's something hearing these album openers...that even if I hear them when I'm shuffling, I want to listen to the whole album.

I used to do the torrent the whole album and give it a shot thing, but I've been greatly disappointed and it's just taken up a lot of space on my hard drive. Time to do some cleaning up...

[schizo]

I'm a single song person. I never like more than a four or five songs by an artist, and they're usually on different albums. I've only downloaded full albums from Muse, the White Stripes, the Raconteurs, and maybe a couple others I can't think of. There really aren't any other bands/artists that I've liked enough to bother with the whole thing.

[jiyong]

Single tracks mostly. I'll give the album a shot if the song is amazing.

[aliiicimo]

I shuffle songs but I buy CDs so I always have the album. Mainly because I'm really OCD about having one song by an artist on my WMP/iTunes. It drives me up the wall.

[NoSex]

always have to have the entire album. don't necessarily have to listen to the entire album, in its intended order, every time i listen. but, i absolutely prefer it.

[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.

[superstitious]

Both. It really depends on my mood and what I am doing at the time. At work, I'm typically a shuffler. There are some albums that I absolutely have to listen to in its entirety. Any Decemberists album, for example. They have stand out songs for sure, but the listening experience is richer when the songs are listened to as part of an album and not a stand alone. Many Radiohead albums are the same way for me, including the ones that Michael pointed out in the first post. I can't imagine listening to one song on Ok Computer. It would feel so odd to do so.

[-DressYourEyelid...]

i don't have an mp3 playa :/ no shuffle for me.

i enjoy really listening and analyzing music. ambiance, reverb, texture, lyrics and the way an album flows are often lost in the song when one isn't really paying full attention to everything going on...

i try to devote my full attention from the start to the end of an album.