The Definitive Guide: 4 Style Rules That Determine If Album Names Are Italicized

Are album names italicized? The short and definitive answer, as of December 2025, is yes—for most academic and non-journalistic writing. The general rule across the world’s most influential style guides, including the Modern Language Association (MLA), the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), and the American Psychological Association (APA), dictates that you must use italics for the titles of full albums because they are considered "longer works." This convention helps readers immediately distinguish a complete collection of music from the individual tracks it contains.

However, this rule is not universal, and the specific context of your writing—whether it’s a college essay, a news report, or a book review—is the single most important factor. The Associated Press (AP) Stylebook, for example, completely rejects the use of italics for music titles, opting for a different punctuation mark entirely. Mastering the correct formatting is a crucial detail for establishing topical authority and credibility in your work, and the rules extend beyond just albums to encompass EPs, box sets, and even classical music compositions.

The Universal Rule: Why MLA, Chicago, and APA Style Demand Italics

The core principle behind the formatting of music titles is the distinction between a "longer work" and a "shorter work." This is the foundational logic used by the three most common academic and publishing style guides: MLA, Chicago, and APA.

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The Longer Work vs. Shorter Work Principle

For decades, these guides have applied a simple yet powerful hierarchy to source titles. Works that are self-contained and comprise a collection of smaller pieces are styled with italics. Works that are only a part of a larger whole are enclosed in quotation marks (" ").

• Longer Work (Italics): This category includes full-length entities such as books, magazines, movies, television series, and, crucially, musical albums. For example, you would write about Taylor Swift’s Midnights or Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN.
• Shorter Work (Quotation Marks): This category includes individual components of a longer work, such as chapters in a book, articles in a magazine, episodes of a TV series, and individual song titles. For example, you would write that the track “Anti-Hero” is from the album Midnights.

This principle applies regardless of whether you are writing for a literature class (MLA Style), a history journal (Chicago Style), or a social science paper (APA Style). The consistency across these major manuals makes italicization rules the widely accepted standard for professional and academic writing.

Specific Style Guide Applications

While the core rule is the same, each guide has slight variations in how the entry is constructed in a Works Cited entry or Reference list:

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MLA Style (Modern Language Association)

MLA is most commonly used in the humanities. In-text, the album title is italicized. In the Works Cited entry, the album title is italicized and followed by the distributor/record company and the year of release.

• Example: The song “Dynamite” is the lead single from BTS’s album Be.

Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS)

Chicago style is popular in history and publishing. It adheres strictly to the longer/shorter work rule. For a full-length album, italics are mandatory. For a song, quotation marks are used. This also extends to other long-form musical works like operas.

APA Style (American Psychological Association)

APA style focuses on the reference list entry. The title of the album (the "longer work") is italicized, but only the first word and proper nouns are capitalized (sentence case), which is a unique feature of APA's Reference list formatting.

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The Major Exception: AP Style and Journalism Formatting

In contrast to the academic world, the world of journalism follows a completely different set of rules set by the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook. If you are writing for a newspaper, a news website, or any media outlet that adheres to AP style, you must be aware of a critical divergence from the standard academic convention.

Under AP Style, you do not italicize album names.

The AP Stylebook mandates that the titles of all major creative works—including books, films, television shows, and musical albums—should be enclosed in quotation marks. This is a deliberate choice to simplify formatting for news production, where italics can sometimes be difficult to render or distracting.

• AP Style Rule: Use quotation marks for all composition titles, including the album and the song.
• Example: The band released their new album "The Tortured Poets Department," which includes the track "Fortnight."

This difference is a major point of confusion for writers transitioning between academic and journalistic settings. Always check your publication’s style guide before submitting to ensure you are following the correct italicization rules or quotation marks usage.

Mastering the Nuances: EPs, Compilations, and Classical Works

To establish true topical authority, a writer must understand how to format the titles of musical works that fall outside the standard album/song dichotomy. These include EP titles, box sets, and the complex world of classical music titles.

Formatting EPs, Mixtapes, and Compilations

The "longer work" principle is the key to formatting these intermediate-length works:

• Extended Plays (EPs) and Mixtapes: An EP (Extended Play) is a recording that is too long to be a single but too short to be considered a full album. Since EPs and Mixtapes function as cohesive, standalone collections of music, they are treated as "longer works" and should be italicized under MLA, Chicago, and APA style.
• Box Sets and Compilations: A Box Set or Compilations album (like a "Greatest Hits" collection) is also a collection of individual tracks, often spanning multiple discs or years. Because they are the overall container for the songs, their titles are also italicized.
• Playlists: In the digital age, Playlists are common. If the playlist is a formal, named, and curated collection (like a Spotify-official release), its title should be italicized.

The Intricacies of Classical Music Titles

Formatting Classical music titles can be the most challenging area, as the rules depend on whether the work has a unique, formal title given by the composer or a generic, descriptive title.

• Unique Titles: If a composition has a unique, formal name, that name is italicized. For example, an opera or a tone poem like Claude Debussy's La Mer is italicized.
• Generic Titles: If the title is generic and descriptive, it is neither italicized nor put in quotation marks. This includes standard forms like symphonies, concertos, and sonatas. You would write "Beethoven's Symphony No. 5" or "Piano Concerto in A Minor by Robert Schumann."
• Individual Movements: Like a song in an album, an individual movement of a larger work is placed in quotation marks. For instance, the "Adagio" movement from Beethoven's Symphony No. 5.

In summary, the question of "are album names italicized" hinges entirely on which of the four major style guides you are following. For academic excellence and general publishing (MLA, Chicago, APA), the album title is an italicized longer work, while the song title is a quoted shorter work. For journalistic clarity (AP Style), both the album and the song are enclosed in quotation marks.