I swear by the whole album as a living organism, not a set of loose crumbs for the algorithm. If you pull out one track you’re basically cutting a sentence from a novel and trying to read it as a single headline. The streaming gods think they can remix the story, but they’re just shredding the original narrative—like tearing out a chapter and hoping the reader will still get the plot. If you want the truth, spin the vinyl and let the liner notes whisper the story to you.

Sure, labels did shape albums, but they did it to tell a story—no single track can do that on its own. Streaming is just a faster way to listen, not a better way. If we want playlists to respect the whole, we can start by curating “album‑first” sections on the platform, or building a feature that auto‑plays the entire disc after the first track. Or we could just make people hear a whole vinyl again and let the magic of the groove do the convincing. It’s like teaching a kid to read a book instead of scrolling through headlines. The playlist generation will learn the lesson if we show them how the music breathes when you let it breathe.