Since you bring up the songwriters perspective I figured I'd jump in here. I really like the idea of writing for an "album". One of the decisions I have to make when we finish the one we're working on is which song to put on a sampler that we're going to be on. It's very difficult because each song is so different to me and none of them alone say all that I'd like to communicate.

That's not to say, though, that there's something wrong with investing songwriting into one or two songs as opposed to a whole album; it's just my preference. I go to a songwriter's forum at my church where we discuss the songs we've written and give each other advise. Most of the other songwriters there have written hundreds of songs, where mine number in the dozens. This just simply doesn't compute to my because I invest so heavily into the few songs I've written, and I very rarely write a new song unless I have something new to say, both muscially and lyrically. So in that sense I totally understand where you're coming from.

Finally, just because some of us like the ideas of getting things in a "package" (which is what an album is) doesn't mean that it's going to stay that way. Once people get used to buying stuff online I'm pretty sure the current concept is going to go away. It's change and I'm not happy about it, but really the album will have outlived it's usefullness. Consider that grouping music together on albums is only a recent thing, given that people have been writing and performing music for ages. Before if an artist wanted to group a musical idea with other musical ideas he or she could package them together and call the ideas movements, but unrelated pieces were always seperable and could be pieced together however a performer wanted. I'm certain that pop music will follow in this vein once there is no compelling value reason to group musical thoughts into albums.

Change is inevitable; one day I'm sure we'll all be trying to explain to our children why playing a certain group of unrelated of music was important to us. I'm sure they'll understand the "Soul Cages", but "Moving Pictures" just won't make sense to them.