Do new releases follow the same scheme as before digital?

So a typical "scheme" for an album is -

Side A - best song of the album first, and gets less exciting closer to the end of the side.
Side B - Maybe 2nd best song of the album first, and gets less exciting up to the last song which is usually pretty "blah".

Doing some research, I found part of why that may have been is because of inner groove distortion on LP's. Yes we could talk technical stuff but the bottom line is - it is often a problem. They want the best songs to have the best quality.

Cassettes just do not have this sound deterioration problem (save for faulty tapes where the problems are in the middle of each side but that is another story.)

Heh, i always thought the reason for the "best song first on each side" had something to do with first impressions of the release. Maybe that IS part of it? LP and cassette stood pretty much side by side in popularity for a time.

SO then - CD's do not have two sides, and usually the only problems encountered are skips, usually during YOUR favorite song, regardless of location.
Of course MP3s do not suffer this problem either, even a full album MP3.

So then, since digital media has no "sides", is there any type of scheme for how the tracks are ordered?

Most of the music I listen to dates back to when it was common for it to be on cassette/LP, so I have not much experience with entire digital (CD or MP3) albums that were never on LP/tape.

As an aside - in the 80's they did the scheme I noted above, but noticed on some albums from the 60's, the best song (or at least one that got the most radio play) was dead last (Tommy Roe "dizzy" and Lou Christy "Lightning strikes"). What was the deal with THAT?

 

Yes, the scheme became frontload all the "important" songs because no one can pay attention to the full length of a 60+ minute cd.

 

I think that often the first and last cuts are ones the artist, producer, or mastering engineer think are really good.

 

Of course it's still considered, but it depends on all sorts of factors. A currently successful artist – who is hardly a household name by any means – who cares a lot about this is Steven Wilson, so all his albums are considered throughout so that both the 'longplaying formats' with no breaks are fluent as well as the ones with program breaks, even if it means one format has tracks reordered to accomplish this (or bonus tracks added).

This is increasingly the case with urban music as well. They may still open with lead singles and so on, but the pacing of the thing really is considered, just like prog rock was back in the day.

I'm sure the average pop/rock hitmaker industry machine simply frontloads with as many potential singles as possible and leaves the filler to the ends. Certainly the case if you investigate something like any given Nickelback album.

 

Yep, one of many inherent flaws in the medium.

They never sounded good to begin with.

Usually? I've never had a CD skip.