95% of the time, I'm listening to albums on my empeg. Usually, I feel like listening to something in particular. The rest of the time, I listen to the whole thing on shuffle. So I don't think you're wrong in doing that.

I've always thought that, in many cases, an album is more than simply the sum of its tracks. It has a life of its own.

And I've always had a good ear for recognizing a song that's interesting, but is obviously on an album that's otherwise crap. I usually find that I'm tired of that one song before long, too, with a few exceptions.

So, to me, the concept of albums will never go away. And I hope recording artists feel the same way. Ever go back and listen to some early sixties albums? It feels more like a collection of singles than an album. And most of those one-hit-wonder albums feel the same way, somehow, regardless of the relative quality of the rest of the tracks. But maybe that's just me.

I keep meaning to go back and make genre categorizations that make sense to me so that I can shuffle on emo or hardcore or bubblegum or easy listening or funk or whatever, rather than the genres that the ID3v1 committee decided I should categorize my music into. Now if only the empeg would support multiple genres per song....

Edit: Oh, and I have occasionally bought singles, but always of bands that I really liked and already had the album of, so that I could get the B-side, if it was a new song. Not in recent years, though.