To see what's at stake, we need a quick history. The twelve-inch LP arrived in 1948 and made the album a coherent artistic form. The cassette and CD in the 1980s made music portable — the Walkman self. The iPod in 2001 unbundled the album into individual tracks. Spotify arrived in the UK in 2011 and turned music into a subscription stream. And since around 2020 we've lived inside fully algorithmic, mood-based feeds. Each shift changed not just how we buy music — but how it feels, and who decides