Author Talk – ‘Body of Work: How the album outplayed the algorithm’

“The album is dead!” How many times have we heard or read that over the last 25 years? Claims of the album’s demise started with the Napster and file-sharing revolution of the early 2000s and continued with iTunes and the playlists of the streaming era. Yet, despite all the technological disruption, the album endures. Artists continue to record and release albums, and the public continues to buy and listen to them.

London-based music industry veteran Keith Jopling explores this phenomenon in his new book, Body of Work: How the album outplayed the algorithm and survived playlist culture. Jopling has worked for Sony Music, Spotify, and EMI as well as global music trade associations. In 2021, he started the music podcast The Art of Longevity. In this exclusive interview, Jopling discusses the reasons for the album’s endurance, Adele standing up to Spotify, how artists can generate attention for their LPs, and more.

Editor’s Note: This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Scroll to the bottom to view the full video interview on our YouTube channel @360degreesound.

360°Sound: What were a few of the major reasons why file sharing and iTunes did not kill the album?

Keith Jopling: I joined the music industry in 2000 just as Napster hit. My job was to report industry data – the sales figures and format trends – for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the global trade body for the labels. For the next six years, I reported the figures going down and down. It was kind of doomsday for a while, because when Napster came along, it obviously atomized the entire catalog of music into hundreds of millions of files. People started downloading songs. Obviously, you could download the album as well, but most people were just getting the singles. And so that was the first declared death of the album.

When iTunes came along, it was kind of strange because Steve Jobs convinced the labels that the best way to tackle piracy was to sell single songs for 99 cents. That was an industry-sanctioned gutting of the album. So those two things came along after many, many years of the CD bloating the album because it could hold twice as much data. Albums were getting longer, and they had more filler. They lost that narrative thread that was really common in the ‘70s and ‘80s – the golden years of the album. Concept albums and things like that seemed like a thing of the past.

So, it felt like both the industry and music fans were ready to dispose of the format. That’s why I really focus the book on the 21st century, because I came into the business and watched all those technology companies come along. I wanted to solve the mystery of why it didn’t kill the album. When iTunes launched, a lot of bands started releasing singles only. Bands basically declared that it was the end of the album. Smashing Pumpkins were one of them. Frontman Billy Corgan was saying, “We’ll go back to the ‘60s, and we’ll release a track a week, or a track a month.” And the funny thing is that nobody really cared. The fans didn’t get it, and many of those bands quickly reverted to making albums. Gradually, from that period onwards, it became apparent that the album wasn’t going to die, but it had a long way to go before it got to where we are now.

Spotify has been more focused on songs and playlists than albums. You mention in your book that Adele asked Spotify to remove their default shuffle feature so that her albums would play through in the order she intended. Do you attribute much of the album’s endurance to artists’ commitment to the album format?

I do. After that experimental period where a few artists tried singles, it’s been the artists who kept on making albums. Why have they done that? Because even record label executives would say to me, “We’re not really sure what to do with albums anymore, but artists still want to make them.” Albums take years to make, and they’re very expensive, and we don’t really know who’s listening. But I think artists understand a few things. First, they get the fact that to make good songs, you have to write a batch of songs. And often, when they’re making albums, they have 50 to 100 demos or song ideas. They may have 20 to 30 really solid songs. But in the process of whittling that down to an album, they’re really focusing on the best songs they have at that period of time as well as telling a story and following a narrative. They’ve continued to want to do that, so artists have a lot to do with it.

But even so, during the streaming era, it was getting harder and harder to make an impact with your album because playlists became the thing of the moment. I talk about the growth of playlists in the book. Spotify helped increase their popularity with their branded, curated playlists, which nobody expected to take off in the way they did. And then along comes TikTok, which only added to the fragmentation. It went from songs to clips to sounds, but artists stuck with the album. I think their commitment to it is extraordinary, and I think it’s hard to quantify the impact of some of this, which is part of the mystery and the fun.

When Adele tweeted to Spotify in 2021 to turn off the shuffle function, it was a really big event. She wanted people to listen in order. Artists spend a lot of time thinking about the sequence of the songs. So that is completely understandable. What’s really curious is that no one knows when Spotify turned that shuffle function on, because it was for every album. I guess maybe one day I’ll find out who did it. Was it an engineer in Stockholm who wrote a line of code and messed with the entire history of recorded music? It’s extraordinary that the labels didn’t step in to stop it, but Adele did, and I think that was one of the key events in the survival and revival of the album.

New albums often get lost among the thousands released to streaming each day. What do you think artists and labels can do to generate more attention for their album releases?

I think a lot more than they’ve been doing, and I think they’re coming round to it. There’s a new Harry Styles album coming out, and obviously, that’s a huge event. He’s launching the album with listening parties in 40 cities around the world. If you go back to Harry’s House, his last record, in 2022, he launched that LP with an article in Homes and Gardens magazine, which I thought was pretty cool. Get outside of the music business, do something different, and generate some publicity around that.

In the intervening four years, I have heard from label execs about this continued push for the album by artists. You’ve got to give a lot of credit to big female pop artists like Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, and Lana Del Rey. Together, they have introduced the album to a whole new generation of fans, and they’ve made the album the centerpiece of their campaign. It’s been the artist initiatives, but the labels are responding. They’re releasing many different versions of the album.

I’m starting to see huge posters of album releases, so they’re going back to old media and presenting the album through many different parts of the press. But it feels like there’s a lot more that they can do. Get behind artists who are doing album anniversary tours. I think they can lean into some of the amazing stuff that’s going on with alternative formats like cassettes and the CD, not just vinyl colorways. Do more immersive experiences and listening parties – things that help make the album an event. We have Record Store Day coming up; that’s a big one. In the UK, we have National Album Day in October. The record business has been getting behind that more.

What is your main hope for the book?

I heard from a reader who went out and bought a whole vinyl setup – turntable, speakers, the lot, and has gone back to vinyl. There were a few cases where people read it, and they told me they’ve gone back to their favorite albums. They’ll say, “I’m going to put it on and listen and put my phone in another room, just to see what that’s like again.” It’s fantastic that people are reading it and enjoying it. It’s meant to be a rapid read. It’s got a lot of different themes in there and a little bit of anecdotal stuff and a lot of industry insight. But if it encourages people to go back to listening, I am absolutely delighted.

Click here to purchase a copy of Keith Jopling’s Body of Work.