On the radio the other day they were talking about albums of recorded music, and whether the concept of ‘an album’ still makes any sense in an era of singly streamed tracks. Commentators thought that there were certain albums, for example Amy Winehouse’s ‘Back to Black’, which still have the reputation of being conceived as a collection of songs charting a journey, and are listened to in their entirety.

It’s often said that the compact disc has fallen out of fashion, even out of use, but the people in this discussion thought that CDs are actually coming back into fashion with certain groups. Gen Z, it seems, see them as an intriguing change from streamed music, and go looking for secondhand CD copies of albums they are interested in. They like to have an artefact that they can keep, own, enjoy the cover art, read the booklet notes, and all the rest of it. And they like the authenticity of an album which the artist designed as a whole.

I was happy to hear this, because in October I have an album coming out on the Hyperion label of piano music by some of the historical women I wrote about in Women and the Piano. I’d been warned that most listeners have switched to streaming single tracks. I felt a bit sad about this, as I’d planned the album as a chronological journey from the mid-18th century onwards, and had spent a lot of time working out which pieces would go together nicely, leading from one to another.

But now I feel some confidence that there are people who will be interested in the whole album, whether on CD or plucked from the ether. I had come to think of the CD audience as being made up of older folk loyal to a ‘legacy medium’, but I’m pleased to learn that it’s more complicated than that.