Matt Bellamy calls albums “almost meaningless”

“Apple, iTunes and streaming services have made the single a more easy thing to access.”

Muse songwriter Matt Bellamy has claimed that albums are now “almost meaningless” due to the dominance of Spotify and iTunes

hey were once the yardstick by which the quality and creativity of a band was measured, but are albums now meaningless? If you’re Matt Bellamy then the answer is yes. Well, sort of.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, the Muse frontman said he felt changes in the way people buy music have reshaped how we should view the importance of albums. Bellamy said: “Apple, iTunes and streaming services have made the single a more easy thing to access. What that’s done has made the album as a collection of songs almost meaningless. But an album that has a concept or story or reason to be an album, if anything, has more meaning now than it ever has.”

Bellamy went on to speak about Muse’s own upcoming album Drones, whose conception is founded upon an ambition to get back to the emphasis on performing live that was a feature of the band’s early songs. Bellamy explained: “Our intention was to go back to how we made music in the early stages of our career, when we were more like a standard three-piece rock band with guitar, bass and drums.”

Speaking of the shift away from the live aspect of their songwriting in the band’s recent work, he confessed, “We probably spent more time in the control room, fiddling with knobs and synths and computers and drum machines than actually playing together as a band. As I look back at the last three albums, each one had progressively less and less songs that we could play live.”

With that in mind, we’re hoping that Drones will see a move back towards songs like this…

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