Musical Album Type

A live album – commonly contrasted with a studio album – is a recording consisting of material (usually music) recorded during stage performances. Live albums may be recorded at a single concert, or combine recordings made at multiple concerts. They usually have a less "finished" character than a studio album, and are intended to reproduce some of the experience of attending a concert performance. As such, they may include applause and other noise from the audience, comments by the performers...

The term soundtrack refers to three related concepts: recorded music accompanying and synchronized to the images of a motion picture, television program or video game; a commercially released soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack of a film or TV show; and the physical area of a film that contains the synchronized recorded sound. In movie industry terminology, a "sound track" (two words) is an audio recording created or used in film production or post-production. Initially the...

A compilation album is an album (music or spoken-word) featuring tracks from one or multiple recording artists, often culled from a variety of sources (such as studio albums, live album, singles, demos and outtakes.) The tracks are usually collected according to a common characteristic, such as popularity, source or subject matter. When the tracks are all essentially by the same recording artist, a compilation album is often referred to as a retrospective album. Compilation album may employ...