Every pop music enthusiast looks with melancholy at the music shelf where albums of favorite artists, gathered with care in the good old days, sat aligned in a precise order. The days when you anxiously waited for a particular album to be released so are, for better or worse, long gone.

Or are they?

Something extremely interesting is happening in the music industry regarding the release of albums. The pop album's glory days may lay in the past, but the medium may not be necessarily dead.

Yes, with the development of the digital era and audio streaming services, pop albums became an endangered species.

Today you don’t have to wait for a whole year to enjoy a new song from your favorite artist. You can find freshly released material year round on websites like YouTube and Spotify.

Online personalized playlists offer limitless hard drive space to save the largest of collections. These playlist programs are trying to be smart, anticipating what they think you may like, and making suggestions to expand and enrich your playlist. So with so many features now available on streaming websites, why should artists work so hard on releasing albums, when they can simply put a song out in a matter of minutes?

<a href="http://blog.thirdbridgecreative.com/2016/07/the-long-play/" target="_blank">Some music execs advise</a> that pop stars should stop releasing any kind of album at all––they could use the extra time to be more creative. Then release the music solely in the digital domain.

But there are a handful of artists, like Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift, who remain loyal to the more traditional methodology of releasing singles along with albums.

It seems that albums are still an integral step in the evolution of an artist.

A number of established artists have released albums that were extremely well-prepared––"statement albums" as they have come to be called. Aside from being released on a physical medium, these albums are also digitally distributed.

Beyonce, Drake, Rihanna, and Kanye are just a few names on this list. And these artists still release singles. But they also take advantage of the album format's expanded canvas, where many pieces of music are presented as a cohesive whole.

These artists continue to show that the pop album is not only still appreciated, but very much alive and kicking.

Few predicted this would happen, believing that ever evolving technology would have changed everything.

And it's true that a lot of things did change. But an artifact that was of great importance to the music industry has managed to survive, finding ways to adapt itself to the rules of the New Game.

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