Total old man rant. Humor me as a guy who once owned about 500 vinyl albums back when there were no other formats available.

I'm going to go start recording my next album. Stay tuned.

Yeah that's untrue. I would say "I got this album on CD". Of course I would at the time never say "I got this album on vinyl" cos that was all we had. But I still called them albums, and alternately CDs, usually to differentiate between the at the time slowly-growing digital part of my collection and the old analogue one.

But "a group of songs I just cobbled together and threw on bandcamp" is much harder to say than "album"

Oh ****, you gonna break some new ground and do some penatonic soloing?

I wonder if anyone made a similar rant when people started calling vinyl records albums. "Albums are PHYSICAL collections, not collections of SOUNDS. Can you touch a sound? I didn't think so. These youngins are out of control."

Which is why we need a new word.

"Internet Collection"
"Bandcamp Release"

The first two that come to mind.

Frowny, I'll stop leaning on my influences as soon as you put out something melodic, with no extraneous noise or dissonance.

I'm currently collarborating with another forum member on an "album". Wanna try a song together?

proof that people don't pay attention to anything I say

Here's a question though, what about music I have stored on my hard drive, in a file... that is titled whatever the album is called.... the songs in order of their appearance on vinyl... with some sort of image file of the album cover... is that an album?

A lot of the time it was a status symbol kind of thing. When CDs first came out, you'd say "Oh I got the new Prince album on CD!" so that everyone would know you had bought it on the newest medium. This quickly became blase and so we all reverted to saying albums, but yeah, CD did enter the language as a sort of replacement for album, just as LP or record did for vinyl. Kind of.

How many more clouds you gonna shout at? Cryin' in the corner, eh? Mind if I join ye?

To me, an album is a bunch of tracks of whatever description, put together with the intention of forming some kind of lose or meticulously planned whole. So if I sit down at my computer and come up with 10 .mp3 files that I intend to go together somehow. Maybe based on vibe, style or inspiration, then it's an album to me. Whether any physical sound storage medium or any real instruments are involved is immaterial to me. It doesn't feel right if there's no cover art to go with it though, but even a thumbnail would qualify to me.

All the albums I've made are albums to me. Given my idea of what an album is, there's definitely no ego stroking involved there. I wouldn't use the term "released" though. That makes it sound like I've had some sort of contract or something. But I will say that I've "uploaded an album I just made".