Album Name Generator

An album is a book you keep records in

Not a metaphor. A physical book, with pages, that you bought empty.

In the early years of recorded music a disc spun at 78 revolutions a minute and held around three minutes a side. Three minutes. That is why a pop song is three minutes long, and it is why nothing longer could exist without splitting the music across several discs.

So by about 1910 shops were selling bound books of empty paper sleeves, with a stiff cover, sized to hold a stack of records upright on a shelf like a book. Some of them had the words record album printed on the front, because that is exactly what they were: an album, in the same sense as a photograph album. A binder for a collection.

In the 1930s the record companies started selling them pre-filled. Three or four discs, six or eight songs, artwork on the cover, notes on the back.

Read that again. The album was the packaging. The music was what you put inside it.

Every time anybody says the word, they are naming the empty book.

It began as a Roman noticeboard

Go back further and it gets stranger.

Album is Latin, and it means white. It is the neuter of albus, the same root that gives a priest his white robe.

In Rome, an album was a board painted or chalked white, on which official notices were written in black. Edicts. Annals. Lists of senators. It was a public whiteboard, and the thing it mostly held was a list of names.

The word slept for a while, then German scholars revived it in the sixteenth century for the album amicorum, a blank book you carried so that friends and colleagues could sign it. A book of friends.

From there it becomes any blank book for collecting things. Verses, sketches, autographs. By 1859 it means a book for photographs. By around 1910 it means a book for records. By 1951 the word has quietly transferred itself from the container to the contents, and an album is a piece of music.

Whiteboard, friendship book, photograph book, record binder, music. Two thousand years, and at every step the word means the empty thing that holds what matters.

The year the album stopped being plural

In June 1948 Columbia introduced a twelve inch disc that turned at thirty three and a third revolutions a minute, with a fine groove. It held around twenty two minutes a side.

That is the whole revolution. Forty five minutes of music, on one object, in one sleeve.

The book of sleeves was suddenly unnecessary. But the word had been in use for forty years and nobody was going to give it up, so it stayed, and it attached itself to a single record that happened to hold roughly what a book of 78s had held.

The consequences went well past packaging. A vinyl side runs about twenty three minutes before the sound quality begins to suffer, so a classic rock album is roughly forty minutes, and it has a Side One and a Side Two, and there is a decision to be made about which song opens each. Then the compact disc arrived with room for eighty minutes and no sides at all, and album lengths grew accordingly.

The shape of the music followed the shape of the object. It always has.

What actually counts as an album

Ask a chart, because a chart has to decide.

For the UK albums chart, a record qualifies if it has more than four tracks, or if it runs longer than twenty five minutes. That is the whole definition, and it is admirably practical.

It also produces oddities. A record with three enormous tracks and an hour of music is an album. A record with five very short ones is also an album. And a single composition that runs past an hour is, technically, an album consisting of one song.

Nobody is enforcing this on you. Artists call things whatever they like, and always have. But it is a reminder that the album is not a natural form. It is a container with rules written by whoever needed to count it.

What an album title is doing

Look at the titles this generator hands you and you can sort them into a small number of jobs.

The one that names a song on it. The title track. It tells you where the centre of gravity is before you have heard a note, and it means the record has a thesis.

The one that names nothing on it. A phrase that belongs to the whole thing rather than any part. These are the titles that read as a mood, and they are doing the same work a subtitle does for a film.

The one that is just the band's name. The eponymous record, usually a debut, occasionally a reintroduction. It says: this is what we are, and we have not yet needed to describe it.

The one that is a joke, or an object, or a piece of punctuation. There is a title in this list with an exclamation mark in it, and one in lowercase. Both are decisions, and both were noticed.

What none of them do is describe the contents. An album title is not a summary. It is a name, and like all names, it works by being said often enough to stop meaning anything else.

How these albums were picked

The albums come from a list our team researched and checked by hand, spanning six decades of records that mattered. One is drawn at random each time. It runs on your own device, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Questions people ask about albums

Why is a collection of songs called an album?

Because it used to be sold in one. Before long-playing records, songs came on separate discs that were stored in a bound book of paper sleeves, exactly like a photograph album. The name belonged to the book, and it stayed after the book disappeared.

What does the word originally mean?

White. In Rome an album was a board painted white for posting public notices, and the notices were usually lists of names. It later came to mean any blank book you collect things in.

When did the modern album appear?

June 1948, when Columbia introduced the microgroove long-playing record. It held about twenty two minutes a side, which is roughly what a whole book of 78s had held, so the old word simply moved across.

How long should an album be?

The forty minute rock album is not an artistic law. It is the length of two sides of a twelve inch record before the sound starts to degrade. Compact discs allowed eighty minutes and albums grew. The medium wrote the form.

Is an EP an album?

Depends who is counting. The UK albums chart takes anything with more than four tracks or over twenty five minutes. Below that it is generally called an EP or a mini album, but no one is checking your paperwork.

References

1. Album. Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/album
2. Album. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Album
3. What's an Album? A short history of a long form. Media History. https://medium.com/media-history/whats-an-album-29afa6619031