Heavily depends on the genre and the artist. A lot of top 40 pop albums are vehicles for singles or designed to get chopped up across some playlists, sure. If t

Heavily depends on the genre and the artist. A lot of top 40 pop albums are vehicles for singles or designed to get chopped up across some playlists, sure. If they bother with the album at all. I would definitely say bands that focus on holistic or even high-concept albums tend to do it often though, and obviously you see more of it in genres like progressive rock where it was kind of a defining mainstay, but it's a form that's alive and well in a lot of genres on a case-by-case basis. For example, I like a Russian pagan folk/black metal act called Arkona (which is pretty well-known by folk metal standards actually) and their latest album released last year is high-concept and cohesive, structured as a katabasis. I'll also warn that it's probably less for everyone than some of their other music as it's very musically gloomy and thematically dark, which makes sense given how things have been going in Russia and especially given the lead singer's family is from Ukraine... Point being, cohesive albums are far from a dying art form, they're just not the format most optimized for broad appeal and whatever monetization method is most favored by the largest distributors (these days probably Spotify and, what like, Apple?), which the most well-known pop music is by definition It's worth considering that writing a cohesive composition that's roughly an hour long (even if broken up into a few different songs) probably takes more effort and vision than accumulating individual songs and eventually releasing them together, so you'd expect the latter to happen more often even in the absence of systematic pressures of other kinds Also, obviously this permits a lot of degrees and can be kind of subjective. Like you can have a whole continuum from "This is one large cohesive opera or play broken up into songs for convenience or structure" to "These songs share some musical motifs or thematic ideas, possibly just explained by all being composed around the same time by the same artist" and the latter of which one listener might view as having a coherent thematic thread through it while another might view it as a bunch of barely-related singles. Often even just the year an album was released can make it a snapshot of the zeitgeist in a big way that sometimes only even seems that way in retrospect