It's sort of funny that the original work to come up with a standard for encoding CDs included making reference to the Album. The original goal was 60 minutes (to beat out the ~22+ minutes/side of an LP), but "Sony vice-president Norio Oga suggested extending the capacity to 74 minutes to accommodate Wilhelm Furtwängler's recording of Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony Number Nine from the 1951 Bayreuth Festival."
Who knows what form we'd have now if they went straight to DVD-length capacity.
/jordan