Trollheart

This is true. For a long time an album was seen as nothing more than a sort of support act for the singles, and filler they could certainly be. Quantity doesn't really trump quality: I'd rather have a really good album every 2 or more years than four substandard albums a year, or whatever.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

RJDG14

I'd agree that a lot of stuff on albums from the 60s was filler, but there again most new albums are also primarily filler in my opinion. There are very few albums that I like every single song from (three exceptions are The Remote Part by Idlewild, One By One by Foo Fighters (ironically people went on about how much of it was filler) and Ring by The Connells - I like pretty much every song on all of them), though that's just my opinion.

The Batlord

You know, indie rock is not actually the only music on earth.

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RJDG14

I know - it's just what I prefer personally.

rostasi

Music is at the apex of creativity and inventiveness right now.
I don't much care if someone releases albums after long intervals
'cause it's hard enough to keep up with the incredible wealth we have now.

The Batlord

But that's the point, even if the little slice of the music world you listen to isn't the most exciting thing on the planet to you, there's thousands, even hundreds of thousands of other artists in countless genres that are not bound by the cultural inertia that indie rock is.

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rostasi

Trollheart

Like rostasi says, it's different now. Back in the 70s and 80s I could listen to whatever albums I could afford, often secondhand ones, so getting them at the rate I did suited me, left me time to listen to them. Nowadays, with itunes, torrents, Spotify, all kinds of music sites (to say nothing of YouTube) you're hard pushed enough to listen to the albums you download, without asking for more. Some of my favourite artistes have released albums two or more years ago that I have yet to listen to. There's just too much, and in an oversaturated marketplace it makes little sense to shorten the release schedule and release even more product into the equation.

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Akai

I'd say King Gizzard are keeping the frequency alive, makes me think of zappa : the 80s era

Lisnaholic

I think there are two main reasons why 60s artists were often so prolific:
Firstly, pre-Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper, the production process was much simpler. Secondly, many artists only got to the recording studio by being locked into some 3-albums-a-year record deal. The record sellers were dictating how many albums the artist had to make.

The formats TH mentions have changed everything; artists have more freedom to upload material as and when they want and in fact, the way music is disseminated now means that "the album" may one day become as old-fashioned as the 78. In both cases the length of the music you hear was dictated by the technology of the time, but these days we can hear music of unlimited length. One extreme example is a piece of music that was especially "composed" to celebrate the Millenium and has been playing ever since, as far as I know. There's even a term for this kind of work; "Generative Music."

Something less rarified than Generative Music is the way we consume music. Whereas I was once a proud collector of albums, I now -like everyone else- have playlists and electronic files; there is no particular reason for YouTube clips and other electronic formats to be tied down to, or released as, albums. Years ago in an interview David Byrne suggested that artists might release music ad-hoc onto the internet, only putting it into "bundles of songs" if it suited the artist for some reason.

If that should be tl;dr :-

The album is a pleasing format that many of us grew up with, but it's going to become increasingly anachronistic imo. Don't be surprised if artists are already shifting away from it as their principal form of expression.

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"Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it and perhaps that is enough." - Sybille Bedford, 1953