The origins of the length of a single, an EP, or an LP have to do with the constraints of physical media like vinyl records.
“The inherent technical limitations of the gramophone disc defined the standard format for commercial recordings in the early 20th century. The relatively crude disc-cutting techniques of the time and the thickness of the needles used on record players limited the number of grooves per inch that could be inscribed on the disc surface and a high rotation speed was necessary to achieve acceptable recording and playback fidelity. 78 rpm was chosen as the standard because of the introduction of the electrically powered synchronous turntable motor in 1925, which ran at 3,600 rpm with a 46:1 gear ratio, resulting in a rotation speed of 78.3 rpm.” - wikipedia
There is a finite amount of information you can fit on a vinyl record; 22 minutes per side to be more specific. So an album maxes out at around 45 minutes of music until you hit double album territory. Digital media has no such limitation. However, we live in an era of depleted attention spans. If you're young enough to have grown up in the digital age, you can probably recall hanging out with friends, or being at a party where the person DJ-
ing would put on a song and everyone in the room would be really excited, start singing or dancing, and then after the first chorus, the song gets changed to something else. Everyone gets excited again, starts singing along, dancing, and then after the first chorus... new song! This is how we ended up with stuff like Tik Tok. Bite sized morsels of video or music that can easily be consumed and then swiped away into oblivion.
I bring this up because there's been a release strategy for years now, where artists, even well-established acts, release one song a week over the course of months leading up to the release of the full album. It's explained that you want to leave your audience wanting more, and by releasing music one track at a time, you stay relevant and the weekly release schedule will keep fans thinking about your music each week. In theory this makes sense. If you can spread releases out over the course of 4-5 months, you're keeping yourself relevant longer, keeping your music in the release cycle, and people will come back every Friday during that period to see what new track you've dropped.
Sounds like a good marketing strategy. But if I'm being honest, whenever I see an album from an artist I love pop up in “New Releases”, but there's only one track from the album available to hear, I don't listen to it. Speaking from my perspective as a fan, I want to know what date I can hear the entire record, and once I have that information, I want to forget about it until that day arrives. I'm more interested in the album as an artistic statement than a song or track on its own.
I had an experience with an album that showed me how hearing singles leading up to a full album release could skew or ruin my experience of the album. In 2019, Flying Lotus released his album “Flamagra”, and used the staggered release strategy. Since I'm a big fan of his music, I listened to the tracks as they were released. So, the first one that came out got the most plays by the time the full record came out, the second single had the second-most, and so on. When I was finally able to listen to the full sequence, the songs that were released as singles now got skipped. I didn't want to hear them as much as the songs that hadn't been available for weeks already. It took me out of the flow of listening to the album the way it was intended.
I don't think you can equate listening to an album with watching a season of a TV show because most people won't experience a full season of TV in one sitting the way you can listen to a full album. There's a concept that I'm very interested in that scientists use to explain the appearance of life and consciousness on Earth. The concept is called “Emergence Theory”, and it basically says that in a given system you can have a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The interaction between these parts creates something unexpected, separate and unique from whatever is happening in each part of the system. On a musical level, a great album is better than the individual songs it contains. I hope we're not on a path to losing that.