List of albums that will still be popular 50 years from now...

Surprisingly, I'm not so sure about The Beatles. But the first two Band albums seem timeless to me. A lot of blues wears well, the same for Jazz. A lot of Pop music sounds dated even before it goes out-of-print.

I'm sure there are so much more to add:

Erick Clapton "Slowhand"
Burt Bacharach "Casino Royal" 

+1 mofimadness, those were some good albums.

I find the saddest part of music today is the loss of the album structure. I can only hope future generations will rediscover how we used to listen to music.


 

Wow, finally a thread which put me into a "thinking mode"!!!
my first reaction is to put My list of My favorites, but since most of the tunes already mentioned do not "ring" with me no more (and my extended list of My favs is already at the Desert Island thread), how/what do I know?... Jazz is safe, its a new "classical", but what else? I think its the music which wont be translated into those upcoming new formats of "total immersion" or the music w/o follow-up developments. What I mean is that nobody (except me) listens to Stockhausen, Zenakis, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze  nowadays: it was absorbed by trance/house/club/new age(oh, my!) and sounds already dated to my kids.
Who reads Philip K Dick or Asimov, you go and watch a movie but, say, Bradbury or Harlan Ellison will be printed because you cannot make a movie out of them. The same with music, if you cannot "improve" it by sticking plasma TV between the speakers, it will be preserved as-is.
my bad, I tend to overthink everything but its such a juicy question that I could not help myself... ;-)

An album needs some unifying theme to make it useful as a whole more so these days than ever.