Alan Ratcliffe wrote
Shuffle and the like are indicative of the faster-paced modern world, where music comes in bite-sized chunks for short attention spans. After all, how many people actually sit down and listen to a whole album anymore?
I feel like I'm giving my age away here :-[ It may well be an age, culture gap thing. When I started listening to music albums were the thing. And you physically had to turn them over.
This created challenges sometimes. I remember a live Emerson, Lake and Palmer album where it seemed that they had decided that the only way to get it on the disc was to have one very long track slow down to a couple of bars of synth noodling and they faded out on that. It was a triple album, cut for those old stacking record players so that you could play sides 1, 2 and 3 then turn the whole stack over and play sides 4, 5 and 6. So at the end of one side you'd get the fade on the noodling. If you had an autochanger the next disc would drop down and it would open with a fade IN on the same piece of noodling and then Greg Lake singing "Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends". Very clever.
Of course you had to get your ducks in a row for all this to work. I don't recall ELP being a dope-head's band, so they may have got away with it.
But yes, you listened to ALBUMS, and you listened to albums a SIDE AT A TIME. So for some artists sequencing was a major concern and they used to pay attention to the sequence of the songs so as to build a mood, a flow into the album.
I think this is still the case for some artists. It wasn't the case for everybody "back then" either. Some acts would just "front load" the album with the singles and then pad it with... uh... padding. So that still happens with some artists, and the careful sequencing still happens with some artists.
The problem is re-issued albums where there is a large amount of space left on the CD and the record company wants to bait the hook so that they can sell you an album that you already have. In those cases the bonus tracks seldom add much and too often they spoil the flow and thus the listening experience.
