Anyone listen to entire albums?


I assume the answer is yes since many of you run vinyl rigs, but just wondering how many around here listen to entire albums at a sitting?  In the age of instant gratification and playlists I seem to be, recently, gravitating to listening through entire albums.  I don’t have vinyl and only stream or play from a network drive so it’s easy for me to bounce around from song to song, artist to artist.  Maybe it’s a nostalgia thing but I enjoy hearing a record in it’s entirely the way the artist recorded it.  I’ve flirted with the idea of vinyl for the very reason that it seems to be a format that lends itself to listening through an entire album in one sitting.  I seem to be less inclined to make that move though now that I’ve been doing the album thing via streaming. 

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If I'm playing vinyl albums, yes, unless I just feel like hearing one side at one time and the other side a little later.. When I put in a CD, I'll generally play the entire thing. When I stream, I would generally do it by playlist and put it on 'shuffle'. Good way of hearing songs I otherwise likely would never have heard again.

If listening to "entire albums" means both sides 1 and 2 on vinyl or digital media, then I'd have to say that I do, indeed, listen to entire albums most of the time.  Sometimes, however, with vinyl, I only listen to one particular side unless there is a or a few tunes on the other that I really like.  With CDs I am much more likely to skip tunes that don't particularly thrill me or that I don't particularly care for.  With digital streaming I am much more likely to play individual tunes, here & there.  Digital media makes it much more convenient to be selective in this respect.  Vinyl, of course, requires you to actually get your butt off the couch.  The reason I do this goes exactly to the point that rcm1203 makes.  I have approximately 500 vinyl albums and around 360 CD discs in my collection.  I also have some cassettes (mostly copies of albums I recorded on a high-end machine back in the day) but I don't play those often at all.  I gave away my 8-track & reel-to-reel stuff long ago.  Of everything in my collection, there are only a couple dozen or so albums that I really, really love in their entirety (i.e.  both sides) and maybe another dozen or so that I like well enough to play both sides of sequentially but are not as cherished as my all-time favorites.

sometimes there's music I don't really like that has a single I love, but usually I listen to complete titles.

There are a precious few albums that are worth listening to all the way through. One enduring classic for me is The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars.

I really love concept albums. Contrawise,  I hate the "throw in" songs to make the A&R man happy. The Stones wrote Star Star for that exact reason. That song still cracks me up :)

Usually, I listen to one side, but occasionally I'll flip the album and listen to the other side.   Last weekend I played all four sides of Privateering, a Mark Knopfler album that is excellent.  Kind of depends on the artist, music and the mood I'm in.