Why do artists not release albums as frequently anymore?
 

Back in the 1960s it was pretty common for artists to release an album every few months. By the 80s once a year seemed pretty typical. Move to the 90s and every two years seemed more typical, but nowadays it's typically a 3-4 year wait. Why don't most release them as frequently now as they used to?

Recording albums costs money.

Hype.

In my opinion everything feels more polished and overproduced now. Is this actually the sort of music that most people value, though?

It's not about value, it's about whether the listener enjoys it. The Weeknd's most recent album is one of my faves, and so what if its overproduced.

True. I need to get around to listening to more of him.

Go and listen to all those albums all those guys released 2 and 3 a year in the 60s. I'll bet you discover there's a handful of decent tracks surrounded by filler cause they only released the album around a few singles.

You've listened to everything?

I'm giving a generalisation.

You should listen to more things because your generalization is wrong.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

:bowdown:

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.

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

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.

I think that while the album format is not exactly the norm (I would argue that it's been this way for about 5ish years already), but I think it will continue to be a sizeable element of the music world for years to come. It may not sell, but I think that labors of love will be abound in this respect, much in the same way that I don't think it's possible for a genre to die anymore. That's at least one positive of the democratization of music.

^ Yes, I'm happy to accept that my remarks aren't quite as cutting edge as I imagined - that the album has already lost its once pre-eminent place.

And as you say, the album will never actually disappear. Not only are so many great bits of music already in album format, but there's something particularly satisfying about 45 mins of music that are linked in some way, (either thematically, or just "this is who we were recording with at the time").

Just as I was clicking "Submit Reply," I thought about the novel as well: you can write one as long or short as you like, but somehow three to six hundred pages still feels like a good comfortable length. Technology hasn't altered that feeling, so I guess in the same way albums will always be a popular way to produce music.

It’s been the year of Donald Trump, water on Mars and Drake, if all the Hotline Bling memes are any indication. Drake has also ridden a wave of change in the music industry, challenging the traditional album release cycle by putting out multiple records in the same year, while peers like Kanye West, Beyoncé and Rihanna dither about whether or not to drop their albums.

But every year is the year of Ke$ha.

Except that Drake has jumped onto the bandwagon of doing the surprise album release that all those other artists you just mentioned did it before him.

Yeah but were they all good? Quantity does not equal or supersede quality...

Finally found "Longplayer," the piece of music that I mentioned earlier:-



For more details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longplayer

So far, it's been playing for seven years, which made me wonder how you might package that in album format. It's either an awful lot of albums, or an awful lot of editing to make a "Best of..." compilation. Actually, composer Jem Finer found an elegant way to dodge the problem - and you can buy his albums of "Longplayer" here:-

https://www.discogs.com/Jem-Finer-Lo...elease/9720058

Clearly just trying to one-up the Halberstadt installation of Organ²/ASLSP.

Not like those short-track merchants Bull of Heaven huh? Five hours? Pah! Write something with a decent length, kid! :laughing:

You know they have tracks that last trillions of years, right?

That of course is impossible, even if they were all vampires. How long is their longest?

310: ΩΣPx0(2^18×5^18)p*k*k*k is 3.343 quindecillion years. I'm not even kidding.

How can it be? Nobody would live that long. The Earth wouldn't live that long!

New technology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer

Don't be so smart. What I mean is, for a song to last that long it first has to be written, yes? And who is going to live long enough to write something that lasts that long in the first place? And don't give me any more stupid smarmy links please if you would be so kind. Explain, if you can, how this is possible.

They use computers to create loops, paulstretch the sounds (that's where you slow audio down by a very large amount without changing the pitch), and other things like that. You could even program your computer to write out sequences for you and take out the writing element too.

Oh. But how can they measure it at the length of time you mentioned?

They just look at what it says in their editing program, presumably.