Like iTunes never happened

More Noughties music stuff. Uncut magazine offers its 150 albums of the decade, without really reflecting on the fact that the Noughties saw ‘The Album’ as a product becoming increasingly less important. As I discuss in Chapter Eight, the most significant music story of the period has not been any one particular release, but the changing means of distribution, most of which parcel up music as discrete tracks. Even if you buy an album these days, how often to you listen to it from beginning to end, in the order the artist intended? The question is not whether the Uncut people have made the right choice, but whether the whole idea of a list of best albums is relevant any more.

Anyway, here’s Uncut’s Top 10:

1. The White Stripes, White Blood Cells
2. Bob Dylan, Love And Theft
3. Wilco, A Ghost Is Born
4. Brian Wilson, Smile
5. The Strokes, Is This It
6. Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Raising Sand
7. The Arcade Fire, Funeral
8. Bob Dylan, Modern Times
9. Ryan Adams, Heartbreaker
10. Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes