plasticbag.org : Observations and Speculations on Music
Like everything else, music is becoming more componentised. Groupings of songs distrubuted as a unit have been a staple of the music industry since the transition from printed to recorded music. But these have often been as much a factor of the media available and the costs and ease of distribution than about how people would ideally like to listen to music. The closest thing we have to how people would ideally listen to music is probably radio – songs selected from a larger assortment based on assumptions of audience preference etc. etc.