My uncle has always chided me for consuming music primarily on a per-song basis. He believes the album is a larger, more complex, and more satisfying artistic work, and assured me that as I got older I'd gravitate toward albums.<p>I am not so sure. I think the album is chiefly a marketing invention. It originated as a way to let record labels charge more than they did for a single, even though marginal value of the "filler" songs was relatively low -- both in terms of cost to the artist, and in terms of enjoyment to the listener.<p>Do you usually listen to full albums? What do you think is the fundamental unit of creative musical expression?
Some albums are very deliberately structured to have a narrative, or otherwise stand as a whole, while some really are just a collection of individual songs. It depends more on the particular album than anything, though.<p>Also, there are other factors affecting the album format besides just the musicians' intent. I remember John Darnielle (of the Mountain Goats) mentioning during a show that in the UK, a single with more than three songs on it doesn't count toward single sales in the charts, so there are often several versions the same single with different B-sides rather than one EP with a few more songs. (Or something like that. Then again, he also said it was probably in the Magna Carta.)<p>FWIW, I tend to listen to albums, but in many cases it's just because I get attached to the sequence of songs.
When I'm (attempting) a critical listening of music. I prefer to explore it in it's larger context (typically as an album). Some 'albums', definitely not all CDs, have a greater architecture than any one song can completely embody, and thus the work is more meaningful in the larger context. (Think conceptual albums, etc.)<p>But I would definitely consider my casual day-to-day listening as song based.
I usually purchase CDs.<p>I've had hard drives fail. I've had removable (and USB) hard drives stolen. I've lost user accounts to online stores (when they tied them to email addresses I haven't used in years) so I can't reauthorize or redownload what I already paid for. When I lived in South Florida, I found that CD-Rs basically erased themselves in the heat/humidity down there (so a CD-R was good for maybe 1 year before it became unreadable).