Record industry bashing has become all but requisite of late in the world of music bloggers, industry commentators, and pretty much anyone else in the habit of pontificating on the subject.

Inspired by the industry-defying moves last year of artists like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, and Madonna, who spurned orthodoxy by releasing albums independently or signing with tour promotion groups instead of record labels, commentators have swept in to justify these actions. They point to the industry’s long history of exploiting artists, arcane unwillingness to embrace technological changes, and artistic stranglehold over mainstream access. The idea is that some sort of revolution in music distribution, beginning with the advent of downloading and brought to fruition by high-profile artists adapting to the new realities, would begin the final downward spiral of the suits and liberate the creativity of the musical everyman, the artist with integrity.

I’ve been part of this talk myself, and really I’m not one to fear change through technology or to care too much about the job security of someone on the marketing side of Metallica albums. But amidst all the bashing, I’d like to think about something good that came out of the tradition of a powerful, centralized recording industry ... something that may, as an unintended consequence, fade away with the industry itself.

The civilian casualty of all this could quite possibly be the album format itself – the idea that eight to 12 or so real songs should play together on the same disc. And as much as I want change, I don’t want the album to go. The music on albums can be linked by concept, artistic and compositional ideas, or simply time and place, but whatever the reason why these connections can make a body of popular music greater than each individual part. The album is a chance for popular music to be art and poetry; I don’t want to see it fade into a schizophrenic barrage of orphan singles.

The artistic advantages of the album format are clear, so a look at the history should make it more clear why they may become less relevant.

When recording was the exception rather than the norm, and when record sales were so low that they weren’t even accounted for properly, singles, rather than complete albums, provided the standard form for records. This was due not only to primitive technology but also to the marketing model – broadcasting hit singles on the radio, profit coming from advertising.

When things changed and album sales became a serious moneymaker, the artistic and economic possibilities of creating complete bodies of music, as opposed to isolated singles backed by filler, exploded. As the Beatles showed the world, listeners cared about quality, and would opt for an LP of beautiful, cohesive music to play from start to finish. For the capital behind the music, the form presented a new way to hook listeners, and stand out from competing artists, and for the artists, it presented a whole new level of expression, providing the space needed to develop complex ideas and liberating their music from the universal requirement of impressing within five seconds and ending before three minutes.

The thing that makes me worry about the future of the complete album as a music presentation strategy, and as a conceptual framework for artists, is that the motivation to create such full statements may wither away as yet another one of the technologically induced changes in the industry. If albums aren’t marketable, as has increasingly become the reality, it seems only likely that they will cease as a form to be replaced by shorter and more frequent releases, which may likely rely on hype and more modest asking prices to sell.

Like all adaptations, if this one comes about it will most likely take time to develop, and for now the ingrained habits from both marketing and artistic sides of the process will prevent an immediate death of the album. But it is truly a sad turn of events that the positive contributions of the industry, conscious or no, may be undone with the bad. I only hope that the liberated artists we have all been talking about will be able to manage the new system, and to find it economical to express themselves completely, like they will finally be allowed.