Focusing on Jon Bon Jovi's complaint that listening to an entire album has become less common as many people buy only the songs they want from itunes: he does h

Focusing on Jon Bon Jovi's complaint that listening to an entire album has become less common as many people buy only the songs they want from itunes: he does have a bit of a point. I'm 37 and my album-oriented listening habits didn't change when mp3 came around. I still prefer to listen to an album at a time. It was jarring to me ten years ago when I checked out the music collections of people born in the 80s and see that they had few full albums and tended to shuffle play. Putting the blame on Steve Jobs is wrong. Napster was the first big source of individual tracks. One reason: on dialup it took maybe three times as long to download a track as it did to listen to it. An album would take hours. This bandwidth problem made it efficient to only grab the track you wanted. There was a cost even if no money changed hands. And early mp3 players were tiny. Flash based players often held less than a gigabyte and many 5 or 10 gigabyte ipods were sold. Steve Jobs did drag the music industry, kicking and screaming, into providing for pay the same type of service as Napster. Apple recognized that individual tracks at low prices were the only format that consumers would accept as a Napster substitute. That price structure gives itunes customers then and now a powerful incentive to buy individual tracks. Music piracy has effectively no bandwidth or storage constraints any more. People commonly rip to 320 kbps mp3 or lossless FLAC. Flash memory players are 16-64 GB. So I would guess that someone who downloads for free is much more likely to grab the full album, or even a box set or discography, than the paying listener. So maybe piracy will be a counter influence to itunes in terms of album oriented versus single oriented listening.