An album is a collection of songs or pieces of music released together, like a musical playlist that an artist creates and shares with the world. When your favorite singer releases a new album, they're giving you 10 or 12 songs (or more) that they recorded and arranged in a particular order. The Beatles released groundbreaking albums like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Taylor Swift has released albums with themes that tell connected stories.

An album can also be a blank book where people collect things. Your grandmother might keep a photo album filled with pictures from important moments in her life, arranged in order and labeled with dates and names. Collectors might have stamp albums or coin albums, with special pages designed to display and protect their collections.

These meanings connect: just as a photo album gathers meaningful pictures, a music album gathers songs. Before digital music, albums came on vinyl records or CDs, and the physical object made the collection feel even more real. Today you might stream an album track by track, but artists still think about albums as complete works, with songs that flow together and create an experience from beginning to end.