If we accept that the label is basically only interested in sales and if it's a big major label it is certainly only interested in sales, then we can move on to how the artist themselves view it because the want of the label becomes negligible. Short of being on an independent label, you'll have to throw some sacrificial logs onto the commercial fire, i.e. the mid-album releases:
As musicians, albums can be viewed as a musicians work expressed as a set of songs meant to convey a statement, artistic, musical or both. Any musician worth their salt would treat an album and each slotted song very carefully, then depnding on the power of the artist, the label could manipulate things.
Albums, as viewed by musicians can also be looked at as a great opportunity to get out and sell yourself and promote your band by attaching some cool songs you got with some others so that people will go out and buy it, maybe there is no message, no statement and no larger artistic goal.
I'd guess if you fall into the latter group, you'd just as soon use the digital media, file sharing for profit networks and leave it at that. Cut down on costs, get the best songs you got out there and try and become famous or rich or whatever. And as cynical as it sounds, if you abandon the album structure, if you are part the pop machine in large fashion, this is exactly what you are doing.
The musicians who care about anything other than that will and should WANT to make albums, and if they carry enough weight as in able to make their label some money) then they should be able to do just that, regardless of what technology delivers it.
So in short, perhaps in the future albums will become a thing of the past for the one machination that never needed them in the first place, short of a cash grab. The pop machine, whatever genre it falls under. And for those musicians who still care about saying SOMETHING for goodness sakes, I think the album will carry on just fine. Maybe it's all digital, and you have to download the artwork, or it's sold as a zip drive, whatever the fuck, I think it will never die.
