[quote=Halo]
It's interesting - my parents have spoken before about how songs have changed because of the format they're listened to. Songs used to be a segment of a deeper, ongoing story, told through the whole album, as they were all listened to in a row. It was an art to transition one song to the next, one piece of the story to another. That art has largely been lost now, when each song is written like a single, intended to be listened to in a self-contained way rather than as part of a larger whole. Maybe that's why people feel the quality and degree of meaning in songs has decreased. The connection has to be made in minutes, not an hour.
[/quote]

There's still a lot of music that does that, but you're definitely right; a lot of music now adays (and probably in the past) treats each song as a single instead of a cohesive story. I'm not one to subscribe to the whole "old music is so much better than new music" argument because the stuff you hear from previous generations is the stuff that [I]survived[/I], the vast majority of it forgotten. Every generation has good artists, every generation has bad ones. Every one has innovative trend setters, every one has mass produced sell-outs. It's actually interesting listening to the radio and seeing what songs from my youth are now the common go-too songs that are like the big ones on say a classic rock station. After a decade, it's still getting regular air time verses the sea of shit that wouldn't be around if it weren't for the Internet.