In recent years there’s been a lot of chat about the so-called “end of the album.” With streaming services giving us the option of endless skips and permanent shuffled songs, perhaps our attention spans are too short to sit down, start an album, and simply let it play. Streaming may have changed the way we consume albums, but at the end of 2021 Adele threw a curveball to “the album is dead” naysayers. As well as releasing her first album in six years, the superstar subsequently made sure that her work, and that of other artists, could be listened to as intended when recorded, by asking Spotify to turn off default shuffle on albums on the platform.
