Call Them ‘Albums’

In your article on Merle Haggard--and in countless other music pieces--The Times continues to perpetuate the wholly inaccurate trend of referring to an artist’s recent recorded output as a “new CD” (“At Peace With the Hard Years,” by Robert Hilburn, Oct. 8).

The proper term for a collection of songs is still an “album.” For fear of sounding old-fashioned, most people won’t call an album an album to save their lives, equating it with a vinyl “record” (short for “phonograph record”).

If it’s a collection, it’s an album, whether its format is record, tape, CD or MP3. If you put your photographs into a book, that book is still a photo album, whether the pictures were taken with a digital camera or on “old-fashioned” film.

ROB MEURER

Studio City