At the end of 2025, I replaced my beaten-up blue Ford Focus with a slightly more recent Ford Focus. The radio still worked but the CD player was entirely dysfunctional.

By Miles Salter

The replacement was white, with a tinge of rust, but with a lot fewer miles on the clock. Foremost in my mind, though, was getting a working CD player so I could listen to albums in the car. Yes, albums. Not just tracks on a Spotify list, or Radio 2 (with its variable presenting talent), or Greatest Hits radio which has classic tracks but a lot of irritating adverts.

Once the money had changed hands and I had the keys, I loaded the car with a bunch of albums that I loved – Revolver by The Beatles, Born To Run by Bruce Springsteen, Fighting by Thin Lizzy, and Twisted by Del Amitri.  In my first twenty minutes in the car, I slotted Who’s Next into the CD player. It was a thrill. I could drive and (once again) listen to some of the world’s best albums without them being interfered with or interrupted.

Keith Jopling, author of Body Of Work, would approve. Like me, he grew up in an era of album releases. As teens in the 1980s we were one of the generations who went to the record shop and get the new one by U2, Pink Floyd, Queen or whoever.

Jopling has worked in the music business. He’s shrewd about recent changes but is unequivocally a champion of the album format: 40 minutes (or so) of music that, at its best, tells a story, dispenses multiple flavours and emotions and takes the listener on a journey.

For those of us who care, the album becomes part of our personal history. Jopling tells an enjoyable story about how a copy of The Police’s Zenyatta Mondatta appeared mysteriously at his doorstep when he was twelve, becoming an album that he loved. The book is dedicated to Freddie Mercury.

Body Of Work examines the recent trends in the music business, bearing witness to the undulating fortunes of the album. Spotify, the giant of streaming platforms, has tended to take listeners away from the album, not even playing albums properly in order. As Jopling points out, artists dislike this trend. They create albums and intend them to be played in a certain order. Body Of Work notes the efforts by artists such as Adele and Mike Scott to have their work consumed in the way it was intended.

Jopling is good on the history of the album format, which began life in 1948 when Columbia began a new venture.  He tracks the album’s ups and downs and is optimistic about its future. After the ‘90s, when album racks nearly vanished in music shops, they are now back with a vengeance.

He points to the success of Taylor Swift and Charlie XCX in harnessing the album format. Young listeners are buying vinyl in large numbers. It’s great to see the album dominating the first floor of my local HMV, even if box sets of DVDS and other trinkets are the big sellers on the ground floor.

My teenage son has lapped up vinyl recently, imbibing Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Radiohead and several post-rock albums which I struggle to appreciate. Oh well. We’ll call the glass half full.

Jopling points out the visual appeal of vinyl to younger listeners, some of whom have the records but nothing to play them on. Possessing vinyl is important to current teenagers – it feels cool.  

I had a couple of minor quibbles with this book. Firstly, I think Jopling is preaching to the converted. The only people who will read Body Of Work are the people who want to listen and buy albums. Those who are glued to Spotify are unlikely to know about the book, much less read it.

Secondly, it takes him 150 pages to say what he might have said in 2000 words, or less, and a slight stodginess creeps in at times: ‘A classic album in the ‘post-album’ age of streaming is hard to define and probably impossible to pin down.’  He’s sniffy about Def Leppard, calling them ‘the luddite lads from Yorkshire’, even if they did help to inspire Taylor Swift’s soaring choruses.  Elsewhere, though, there are pithy comments about the joys of long players. ‘Joni Mitchell records are best played at nighttime,’ he notes.

Will the album survive? Jopling is optimistic, noting that vinyl sales in 2024 hit $1.4 billion, the highest level since 1984. That said, most music consumers in 2026 rely on playlists and algorithms, and old vinyl and CD collections are being cleared out in favour of smart speakers and streaming platforms. (My collection of music sprawls across vinyl, cassette, CDs, homemade tapes from yesteryear and iTunes. Picking up old albums on CD for a paltry quid is still a minor thrill.)  

While reading Body Of Work, I asked a 50-something friend to tell me the last time they listened to an album in its entirety. Their response? ‘Twenty years ago’.  

At the end of the book, Jopling supplies a list of recent albums that have succeeded.  Depressingly, acts like Jay-Z, Drake and Kanye West appear frequently.

The other day I was in the local BP garage and was astonished to hear ‘Lonely Ol’ Night’, an Americana track from John Mellencamp’s excellent 1985 Scarecrow album. It was a thrill to hear it, even if it was part of another playlist that provides a soporific soundtrack to consumerism.

The album isn’t dead, partly because artists love the platform it provides for expression and experimentation. But the sweep of history is long, and consumers seem to be getting lazier as technology grows more insidious, impacting both the way music is made and consumed. Will music lovers still enjoy Sgt Pepper in its entirety in 2076, over a hundred years after it was first released, or will it seem anachronistic? I’d guess that the 1967 classic will still be played, but as to how many people will bother…

Body Of Work by Keith Jopling is published by Repeater Books, price £11.99.

Miles Salter is a writer and musician based in York. His top ten favourite albums are, today:

Pretenders – Pretenders (1980)

Johnny The Fox – Thin Lizzy (1976)

August and Everything After – Counting Crows (1993)

Born To Run – Bruce Springsteen (1975)

Twisted – Del Amitri (1995)

Reckless – Bryan Adams (1985)

Bringing It All Back Home – Bob Dylan (1965)  

The Joshua Tree – U2 (1987)

Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – The Beatles (1967)

A Night At The Opera – Queen (1975)