The most welcome musical trend of 2015 was the return of the narrative album. While they don’t necessarily have to be traditional concept albums as such, when done well, they can often be the most cherished in our collection due to their sonic or lyrical cohesion.

2014 was disappointing on this front. Interesting albums such as FKA Twigs’ LP1 or Alt-J’s This Is All Yours were either dominated by one superb single or simply lacked an overarching thread. This year had no such problems, delivering at least two exceptional narrative albums in the form of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and Tame Impala’s Currents. While they are musically very different, they both share a single-mindedness that lends them an almost cinematic quality. While Kendrick took on the massive theme of American attitudes to race, Kevin Parker’s exploration of structural change and personal development made Currents as powerful on an introspective level as To Pimp a Butterfly was on a systemic and outspoken one; Lamar’s hit ‘Alright’ has since been adopted as an unofficial anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement.

These two albums, along with others from Jamie xx and The Weeknd, have struck a timely blow for the album. Constant changes to the ways in which music is consumed continue to represent an existential crisis for the album as the predominant form of music. I believe it is crucial that artists continue to release thoughtful albums that deserve and even demand to be listened to in full. I can only hope that the next year matches this one.

That threat to albums comes in no small part from streaming. Although the inevitable rise of streaming has been evident since Spotify’s 2011 US launch, it was in 2015 that streaming became the truly dominant music platform. No longer is it the norm for us to pay £7.99 in order to (legally) download an album from iTunes. Instead we pay something similar for all the music we want at the touch of a button. Ultimately, the proliferation of streaming services such as Spotify, Tidal and Google Play Music has meant that our listening habits have undergone a radical shift.

Anecdotally, I have certainly noticed that most of my friends now seem to access music through streaming services. It is rare now to meet someone and be limited by the contents of their iTunes library or the 16GB of memory on their phone. The new ubiquity of streaming services is borne out in the figures too. There were 11.5 billion streams in the first 6 months of 2015 compared to 14.8 billion in the entirety of 2014 and streams per week hit the 500 million mark in July. Astonishingly, this figure is twice as much as 2014’s equivalent. In addition, the launch of Apple Music on 30th June means that the world’s most profitable company is committed to growing the industry further.

Clearly then, streaming is here to stay. Interestingly though, increased use of streaming is strongly correlated with increased live ticket and vinyl sales. As streaming services allow us to access music for close to nothing, we, as listeners, are more inclined to engage with the music industry than ever before. In other words, this new convenience, far from degrading the product as some may have feared, has had the opposite effect. This great migration means that we are no longer reluctant to pay for the authentic listening experience. If only artists got such a good deal.