A friend was talking to me about pimping her pod - helping her to rip some of her cds to her shiny new iPod (at least I think that's what she meant ;) - and it made me think about the album vs track thing.
Personally I'm a fan of the album as a piece of art in it's own right. An album isn't just a single song (though you may well buy an album for a particular song), it's a collection of songs arranged in a particular way that hopefully becomes greater than the sum of it's parts. Ideally this collection of songs works together to create a mood or tell a story (or a bunch of related stories), with each track working with the next.
This is why I pretty well always put albums rather than individual songs on the iPod.
I've had discussions with track people who make a pretty good point that it's rare to get an album that's "all killer and no filler" (thanks Jo) and why waste space with dud tracks and if you're going to pop it on shuffle anyway, what does it matter. I like switching over to shuffle from time to time - it's kind of like your own personal radio station although without the surprises.
I keep meaning to do an iTunes cull one of these days - create a little more space on the hard drive and weed out some of the filler - but what if a song which is weak in it's own right still plays an important part in an album as a whole?
(Or maybe I'm just a hoarder)
Not sure where this places compilation albums of course - either to a theme or best-ofs - but maybe that's for another time.
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