The challenges of being free from traditional album formats

When I decided I was making a musical Dream Journal, a nagging voice kept bleating: "Soooo, do you want to release this in album-length chunks?" By "album", I was thinking of 10-20 songs, 60-70 minutes (or shorter) as commonly found on CDs.

It's no secret that media's physical limitations have long imposed their passive will on how art ends up, and I reflected on how best to uncondition myself from such a rigid structure. I thought about older formats (cassettes, vinyl) being limited by even shorter/flip-side runtime and while reading rachMiel's column in the latest Computer Music, pondered what "album" meant to me in this specific instance.

Couldn't I just have a single album titled "Dream Journal" and continue to add pieces, with final pricing for the whole bundle not yet decided, but what was ultimately important was to first  contribute to this body of work AND share it with the world?

I decided I could definitely do this — the challenges are in part technical, as many music-sharing sites will BREAK upon uploading, um, big albums. (They have "special needs".) I've extensive experience and proof of notable examples:

• Jamendo shuddered and squealed, then spit my tracks out of order when I released solo piano 7: it's the same reason why not all 176 tracks are on the Jamendo release, since I couldn't edit an album after uploading it, and it was so painful and problematic to upload. Jamendo continues to suffer problems choking on properly-formatted lossless audio files, as I experienced the other day when trying to upload my DJ there, then getting fed up as it sputtered. Still, I continue to be one of the more popular artists there; solo piano 7 is #21st most popular album this week. Nice!
• last.fm's scripts froze my browser as it found itself at a loss to display a page of 100-something MP3s from The Final Selection. This followed a achy period in which I tried to upload a 50-song .zip pack and found myself rebuffed as the uploader stalled. I've asked for help with my back catalogue; none received so far.
• Grooveshark had maintenance issues, then I thought things were a-go. Admirably, the technical process of uploading went largely as expected, but even though my tracks appeared correctly sequenced in the file browser, post-upload, they were jumbled. Dan Pua has been a prompt and welcome help in this endeavor.
• SoundCloud doesn't allow super-batch uploads unless you're on one of their membership plans… which I'm not.
• imeem restricts to 100 songs (which clearly isn't enough), again, unless you get a membership plan. But their Adobe AIR-based uploader worked well.
• Bandcamp doesn't have batch uploads yet, but out of everyone, as enscribed earlier, they've been the most amenable to my Dream Journal aspirations, so they're the main site I'm going with — Ethan Diamond has been such a great help in the last days!

That's most, not all of my stories. But enough to hopefully show why I feel this way, and provide guidance to other artists who put together ongoing chronicles that aren't orphaned, yet don't belong to a conventional "album".

When it came time for ID3 tagging, I've simply been inserting "Dream Journal" as the album title as necessary. (Bandcamp provides its own metadata… yayzerama!) My dreams are non-judgmental and often out-of-sequence, yet these have a unified theme of dreams, or as rachMiel puts it in CM142:

… the album (whole) must possess some over-arching presence that does not arise from the mere succession of its constituent tracks (parts). This is an alchemical process in where a collection acquires an enveloping aura from the interaction of parts.