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Songs have always been unbundled, of course: radio stations, juke boxes, sheet music, individual performances, 45s, music videos. In the history of music, the album era was a relatively short interlude driven by tech advances, marketing, & groups like the Beatles en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Album_era

Thanks for the link, the "album era" was 1960s-->2005. I guess in the same way scientific figures and data sets have "always been" unbundled (shared in a lab, with colleagues, or dropped in a data repository). But very much the mainstream way to share in science remains bundled.

I admit I am skeptical about unbundling science (but willing to be convinced). I'm skeptical because in my field at least (social science), it's very hard to make sense of the data without the context, i.e, the introduction and methods. With those, plus the data, you basically have a paper.

I'm not sure that the shift from albums to streaming is a great model to aspire to. It's been a disaster for most artists and devalued most creative works.

Yeah, tried in a few spots to point that out, but maybe not hard enough. Streaming is not a model science should copy wholesale, and certainly not arguing that science should “be Spotify.”

What I think is worth learning from is the structural shift: modularity changed how value moved through the system, for better and for worse. It made new things possible, but the outcomes depended on who controlled the infrastructure and how incentives were set.

Interesting ideas & industry needs new directions. A comment on analogy: most artistically-minded musicians & most serious fans still see the album as the primary mode. Those listeners are rare now. But it doesn’t mean the quality or experience is improved. The unbundling isn’t necessarily good.