Sometimes thatвЂ™s planned вЂ“ not surprisingly, albums of songs are often the best examples, the winners of the recital and vocal categories in this yearвЂ™s Gramophone Awards both offering emotional progressions through carefully planned programmes. Sometimes an albumвЂ™s power lies in the vision of a musician who, by placing songs or pieces of music together in a compelling way, seeking and communicating connections, can create something that becomes far greater than the individual parts. The term album evokes more than simply music caught on record: it evokes a thought-through planned journey, a story, a potentially profound moment of connection between an artist and a listener. But secondly, and more importantly, because I think in neglecting the term вЂalbumвЂ™, something was lost. Firstly, and most prosaically, because when youвЂ™re just as likely to be streaming on an iPhone as putting a CD into a player, it makes sense to reach for a format-neutral term. ItвЂ™s something IвЂ™ve started to change in GramophoneвЂ™s pages. But as classical releases came to be dominated by, say, single symphonies, or perhaps a coupling of two concertos, or a complete opera, the term album was used less, and the format become the key descriptor вЂ“ LP, CD, and so on.

In pop and rock, of course, it came to mean a record which contained within it multiple songs, in a themed, unified concept.

In subsequent years, however, вЂalbumвЂ™В was rarely used as a termВ in classical music. (And those of us who love music know that a sonic snapshot of a moment can be even more powerful than a picture: if a picture speaks a thousand words, music has the ability to speak a thousand pictures). But we might trace the roots of the term back further still, to when a set of 78s would be presented in a protective fold-out book вЂ“ like a photo album, only with record sleeves instead of images. We live in a streaming age, when a recording can be broken up, expanded, re-packaged, tracks excised or woven into a day-long playlist, music sliced, diced and spliced in myriad ways вЂ“ all of which forces us to confront that opening question: what, indeed, doesВ an вЂalbumвЂ™ mean? Why is it important?ДЄrchivists date the album back to the 1948 release of ColumbiaвЂ™s first 12-inch vinyl, Nathan MilsteinвЂ™s release of MendelssohnвЂ™s Violin Concerto the album was, gratifyingly, therefore born as a classical recording. That I was serendipitously thinking along similar lines as the UKвЂ™s record industry body reflects, I think, something transformative thatвЂ™s going on in the way we listen to music today. What does an Album mean to you? ThatвЂ™s the question I asked in Gramophone back in the spring, before I was aware of the launch of the BPI/ERAвЂ™s inspired initiative, National Album Day.