IMHBCO (In my humble but correct opinion): the journal issue and the record album: two fundamentally irrational information products

Over the past few years I've become more and more convinced that the scholarly information world has a lot to learn from the music industry. Not so much from what the latter is doing either right or wrong, but from what has happened to it over the past 100 years, how it has happened, and why. From the early decades of the 20th century until the 1950s, "buying a record" generally meant buying a shellac disc that contained only a bite-sized portion of music: a popular song, a single performance of a jazz composition, a brief piece of light classical music. Each disc could hold about three minutes of recorded sound. If you wanted to listen to something longer (an entire symphony, for example), you had to buy an "album" ? a package of multiple records that you played in sequence.