FEATURE: The True Definition of An L.P. Sorry I’m Late: Are Longer Albums Risking Quality Control or Offering Better Value for Fans?

FEATURE:

 

 

The True Definition of An L.P.

PHOTO CREDIT: Ruslan Sikunov/Pexels

 

Sorry I’m Late: Are Longer Albums Risking Quality Control or Offering Better Value for Fans?

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IT does seem like album are getting longer…

IN THIS PHOTO: Mae Muller/PHOTO CREDIT: Maximilian Hetherington

Not that there are statistics to see how that has changed during the year. It does seem like there is this thing around providing fans with value and more insight. Albums that tell more of a story of include more songs. Albums of physical formats like vinyl and even C.D. can seem expensive if there are ten or eleven tracks. If an artist can release an album with fifteen or sixteen tracks and charge roughly the same – though it might cost more on vinyl -, is that better for everyone? I have noticed it in general. Maybe it is something more common with commercial artists. Take someone like Taylor Swift and the recent 1989 (Taylor's Version). That is out on 27th October. That runs at twenty-one tracks. Speak Now (Taylor's Version) – also released this year – is twenty-two tracks! Even her original studio album, Midnights, for its 3am Edition, ran at twenty tracks. I am thinking about this because Mae Muller put out a tweet when she released her debut album, Sorry I’m Late, last month. Receiving acclaim, this is an album fans have been waiting for a while. She put out that post, as I feel a lot of people might feel it excessive that an album has seventeen songs on it. Clearly all quality enough for people to hear, Muller could easily have put out her debut and then reissued it a few weeks later with extra tracks. Instead, we get an album that is actually decent value for money – with the vinyl being £30 and the C.D. around about £14. I feel value for money is a thing. Even if you do not like a couple of tracks on Sorry I’m Late, you are still getting great value! I don’t think it detract from a complete experience or loses quality. Even at £38, for a vinyl copy of Taylor Swift’s 1989 (Taylor's Version), that is pretty good?!

I have said how vinyl is very expensive. Most albums are about ten to twelve/thirteen tracks. A vinyl copy might be, say, anywhere between £20-£25. The excellent falling or flying from Jorja Smith is sixteen songs. A vinyl copy is £25. That is not much more than you’d pay for a new studio album with three or four songs fewer – or a classic album that has been out for decades. It may be harder to market these longer albums on cassette – as it might get bulky and be spread across a doubler cassette or two cassettes -, but I like that artists are taking a risk and being more expensive…without being too expensive! With so many artists reissuing albums with extra tracks, meaning fans might sell out a lot of money to get more than one version of an album, perhaps releasing longer albums saves them that?! I will get to the subject of quality control. As many artists are embracing physical formats, like they did in the 1990s, filling every groove and spare inch of audio space with music seems like a necessary thing. It can be challenging deciding what the optimum number of songs is. The traditional ten or eleven songs is no longer the standard. More and more artists, even on a debut, are exceeding sixteen tracks. It can mean there is a bit of lag and sag here and there. You also get the option of those extra tracks you would not have otherwise had. Interesting to ask why…

Of course, in an age where more and more artists relying on streaming, getting those numbers high is more possible with a longer album. If the likes of Taylor Swift have been criticised because of their wealth, you wonder whether this will intensify the gulf (between huge artists and the majority who do not earn a living wage through music). Mae Muller’s reasoning is not related to streaming success and making money that way. She wants to give her fans as much as possible. If you have to wait a while for an album and there is the hype, maybe artists get nervous and want to include everything. Rewarding that patience – even if people never wait long and there is so much pressure to release something quickly. In the case of mainstream artists who have been around a while, I guess they do want to generate as many streams as they can. Even though they are releasing these long albums, the songs on there are available separately. It means there is greater revenue potential. That may seem cynical, though it is something all artists are considering. If a smaller band coming through generates very little with an album that has eleven or twelve tracks on, giving fans almost double that might push them in terms of how much they spend recording. It also means they have that opportunity to get more streaming figures and money from that – even if, in reality, the amount they earn is peanuts compared to huge artists regularly pulling millions of streams per song!

Some might say longer album is nothing new. This is true! I think it is more marked and discussion-worthy now, as one assumes people are less patient. On a twenty-track album, are people just going to skip the closer you get to the end?! In the case of artists like Jorja Smith and Mae Muller, they cannot waste songs deemed essential. You get this rounder impression of an album’s journey. One drawback is, when buying it physically, it may be a little too dear for many fans’ pockets. Streaming, therefore, is the option if they want the album but can’t afford a version that is over £30. Technology now means that artists can be recording for an album and have a few tracks that need to be polished and buffed. Technology can do that for them, so they are not spending extra studio hours and money recording. This 2019 piece noted how critically acclaimed albums were getting shorter. Was the fact they were acclaimed because there was concision in terms of the number of songs on an album and the length of each track?! Journalists for years have been asking whether albums are getting longer. Some take the positives from that – you get more music, which can be a good thing -, whereas others state that there is less quality control, and it can be a test of patience and finances investing in these albums. Rap albums were in the news a few years back, as they seemed to be getting longer. Why was this happening? Rolling Stone gave their take:

“WITH 24 TRACKS, clocking in at one hour and 46 minutes, Migos‘ Culture II lasts long enough to listen to all of Pink Floyd’s The Wall and still make it more than halfway through The Dark Side of the Moon. Its Number One debut on the Billboard album chart is the latest twist in streaming’s reshaping of music consumption: the rise of mega albums.

On Spotify, the duration of the top five streamed albums rose almost 10 minutes over the past five years, to an average of 60 minutes. It’s a trend embraced by Drake (2016’s Views was one hour and 21 minutes), Lana Del Rey (2017’s Lust for Life was one hour and 11 minutes) and Future (his two back-to-back albums in February 2017, Future and Hndrxx, totaled two hours and 10 minutes). What’s driving the trend?

“Stacking albums with extra songs is a strategic way to achieve certain goals,” says Malcolm Manswell, a marketing manager for Atlantic Records. In 2014, Billboard incorporated streaming into its chart calculations (1,500 on-demand streams equals one LP), and two years later, the Recording Industry Association of America adopted the same formula for album certifications. Longer albums that generate more streams can lead to Number One chart debuts and gold and platinum plaques. Last fall, when Chris Brown released the 45-song Heartbreak on a Full Moon, it was certified gold in less than 10 days, even though none of its singles cracked the Top 40. Album certifications remain “the indication of a great artist,” says Manswell. “On the sponsorship side, this stuff helps labels sell an artist or argue for why a brand should use an artist.”

Exploiting loopholes is nothing new in the music business. “I don’t think [releasing an extra-long album] is different than bundling tickets to your concert with your first-week sales,” says Daniel Glass, president of Glassnote Records. The bundling strategy, where fans that purchase tour tickets then get a code they can redeem for an album, is a favorite of rock and pop acts; Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem and Pink used it to ensure they debuted at Number One in 2017. (Billboard only counts a ticket sale as an album sale if a fan uses his or her code”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: cottonbro studio/Pexels

In 2016, FACT asked whether artists were getting ambitious and didn’t need to be hindered by the limitations of physical formats – they could put out a double vinyl or fit twenty tracks onto a C.D. –, or was there something more cynical at play?! Actually, a ruling from 2014 might be still a factor when we wonder why albums are getting longer today:

“At the end of 2014, Billboard changed the rules that govern the charts to reflect the way we’re now listening to music. It was the biggest upheaval in the way that information is collected since 1991, when hard sales data replaced the risible surveying of a limited number of record outlets up and down the country. “Album sales have become a smaller and smaller part of the industry,” said Nielsen senior analyst David Bakula at the time of the changes. “To just look at album sales and say this is how we measure success is really leaving out that half of the business is coming from streams and song sales.”

New rules mean that individual singles all count towards the chart progress of an album. So the question is, are artists upping production to take advantage of the fact that individual song streams now contribute to chart placement? It’s fairly simple arithmetic: the more songs to stream, the higher an album charts, hence the heft. L’Histoire de Melody Nelson by Serge Gainsbourg, Reign In Blood by Slayer, Sleater Kinney by Sleater Kinney, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside by Earl Sweatshirt – all under half an hour in length – may not have been held in the same high esteem had the CEO of the label said, “Great, but could you pad it out with another half an hour of filler to get it up the charts?”

It wouldn’t be the first time record companies have taken advantage of lax regulations to push someone on their roster up the hit parade. In the 1990s the singles charts became more or less rigged by major labels offering unlimited tracks, stickers, a variety of coloured picture discs and singles in five different formats. New releases of CD singles were priced at 99p, going up to £3.99 on the second week of release, meaning songs would crash in at number one before dropping out of the top 10 the following week. Suddenly there were 50 number ones a year and the whole thing became meaningless, so by the time the chart authorities tightened up the rules, we’d all got bored and wandered off to have our frosted tips done instead.

Perhaps the strangest recent rule change by the RIAA is the one where songs released ages ago still count towards album sales if they’re included on the LP, which may go some way to explaining why Drake tacked ‘Hotline Bling’ – released last July – onto the end of Views. “1,500 on-demand song streams in the United States [hold] the same value as 10 individual track sales or one full album sale,” according to Forbes. ‘Hotline Bling’ has so far been streamed over 400 million times on Spotify and 700 million times on YouTube. In the US, those 400 million streams equate to 267,000 album sales under the RIAA’s new rules. There was never any doubt that Drake’s weakest album to date would go platinum – and that was long before the other 19 tracks had even left the studio”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Marina Photos/Pexels

Often, when we talk of long albums and this ‘what length is too long?!’ debate, it is records from Hip-Hop and Rap. I will also talk about between-album E.P.s and how they are more frequent. Actually, as Pop artists are putting out albums with sixteen tracks or more, it is not reserved to one or two genres. A complex question is this: Is less more? That is a debate that applies to all creative mediums (maybe not literature). The appropriately-named COMPLEX provided their perspective in 2021:

“According to Rolling Stone, the duration of the top five streamed albums on Spotify rose almost 10 minutes between 2013 and 2018, to an average of 60 minutes. Although, as Pitchfork points out, there were times in the late ‘‘90s and early 2000s when the average rap album was even longer than it is now. But double albums like OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below or Dipset’s Diplomatic Immunity were the result of calculated decisions in an era of physical production costs, whereas long albums in today’s streaming era often lack artistic intention.

It’s worth noting that artists, especially in hip-hop, are always sitting on a lot of unreleased music. Migos collaborators have gone on record stating that they can make songs in under 20 minutes, and artists often have dozens of songs in the vault, waiting to be released. Even so, the decision to bulk up albums seems to be driven more from a commercial standpoint, rather than a desire to “feed the fans.” When Billboard and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) began incorporating streaming numbers in chart and certifications calculations, it gave artists an incentive to bulk up their albums. The longer the album, the more likely it is to generate streams, which can lead to a higher ranking on Billboard or a platinum plaque. Both Migos and Drake debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 2018, while Chris Brown’s lengthy album debuted at No. 3. This strategy is even more important right now, after the COVID-19 pandemic put a strain on yearly income and left artists looking for ways to make up for touring revenue.

Joey Badass once told Complex that a good album should have no more than 14 songs, with the duration likely varying between 30 to 45 minutes: “I don’t care if it was Michael Jackson, I am not listening to 25 songs. Less is more in my opinion.”

Financial benefits aside, though, stacking albums doesn’t take into consideration how music consumption has changed over the last few years. According to database company Statista, 54 percent of global consumers listen to fewer albums than they did five or 10 years ago. A 2019 survey conducted by Deezer in the UK, revealed that 15 percent of music fans under the age of 25 have never listened to a full album. Forty-two percent of those listeners are putting their favorite tracks on shuffle or playing them individually. Sure, adding more songs to a tracklist improves the chances that they’ll be added to playlists, but it damages the overall listening experience for a generation that’s moving away from listening to albums anyway. And in the streaming era, fans are receiving more music than ever before. Gone are the days of buying a couple albums at the record store and listening to them repeatedly for months. Today, fans have access to dozens of new albums every Friday, so it can become increasingly tiresome to shuffle through 20-song albums each music cycle.

Tracklists with 18 or more songs often cause fatigue for listeners. By the time you make it to the second half of these albums, they start sounding monotonous and stacked with filler tracks. Migos have fallen victim to this criticism. Following Culture III’s release, fans complained that the second half of the album sounded redundant and could have benefited from shortening the tracklist by three or four tracks. There were similar complaints about Culture II. These long tracklists also don’t cater to the way people actually listen to music. Very seldomly do you sit in one place while consuming an album. You’re usually on the train, in the car, or completing other day-to-day tasks, often making it difficult to listen to the same album for more than 30 minutes.

So, what is the ideal album length? Joey Badass once told Complex that a good album should have no more than 14 songs, with the duration likely varying between 30 to 45 minutes. “I don’t care if it was Michael Jackson, I am not listening to 25 songs. Less is more in my opinion,” he said.

The deluxe album trend could be a more effective way of releasing large quantities of music. Many artists, including Lil Baby, DaBaby, and the Weeknd dropped deluxe albums in 2020, which included five to 10 extra tracks each. The bonus tracks were listed under the album on streaming platforms, but were dropped weeks after the original release. The deluxe method gives listeners a break to digest music at a slower pace, which reduces the likelihood of exhaustion (although, of course, there will still be complaints from some fans about receiving too much music)”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Martin Péchy/Pexels

Many might note how this feature is already long. Ironically, am I spending too much time writing about whether albums are too long?! Well, frankly, no. It is a tricky debate that has many different sides – especially when it comes to vinyl (sorry!). I want to bring in a couple of other takes, as this argument about album length has been discussed for years now. I will end with my opinion. This feature from 2020 discussed the importance of album running time and getting it ‘just right’:

“Earlier this year, I was listening to the new Beach Bunny record and (half) jokingly tweeted that “any LP that's less than 26 minutes is an automatic 9/10 in my mind.” That’s obviously a slight exaggeration, but I do think that shorter albums are generally better and harder to pull off than longer ones. While I realize the running time of a record may seem like an esoteric piece of trivia, I believe it’s actually a vital component of what makes an album good. Sure, I love long-winded double albums, 20-minute songs, and concept albums as much as the next guy, but by and large most of my favorite records, especially recently, are ones that tend to be leaner and more economical with their time. Hell, my favorite album of last year was a 6-track EP, so this post is a long time coming. Truthfully I think shorter records are harder to make and therefore are not the norm. I also think they can be stronger, more creative, and more impactful than a “traditional”-length album for many reasons.

In my mind, an album’s running time is as essential as it’s tracklist or sequencing. Many artists don’t take those things into consideration, but the ones that do often end up crafting a more compelling piece of art. The new Ratboys album is a perfect example of a masterfully-sequenced record; each side opens with a fast-paced single, side one closes with a banger, and the back half of the album works up to a beautifully meditative title track made all the more poignant by the flow of the songs that come before it. Part of what makes Printer’s Devil great is, yes, the songs themselves, but also how the band decided to order those songs and walk the listener through them. You could take those same 11 tracks, rearrange them, and the album would be flat-out worse.

When an artist releases an album, generally, it has a point. The musician sets out to capture a feeling, depict a time in their life, or make a statement on something in the world. If you can get your point across in less time, that only makes your message all the more compelling. One of the first times I consciously began to think about album running times was when Japanese Breakfast released Psychompmp back in 2016. Admittedly enamored with the (now) infamous long-form indieheads shitpost about the album, I went into the record with almost-non-existent expectations and came out the other side 25-minutes later blown away.

Essentially a concept album about her mother’s death, Michelle Zauner set out to capture her grief, experiences, and feelings that surrounded this major event in her life. The album opens poppy enough with the mystifying “In Heaven,” the soaring “Rugged Country,” and the immensely danceable “Everybody Wants to Love You.” Things take a turn halfway through where the titular “Psychopomp” stops the listener in their tracks with a spacy instrumental containing a voicemail of Michelle’s mom. From there, “Jane Cum” bowls the listener over with a wordless explosion of grief, pain, and sharp feelings. Not only is “Jane Cum” one of the most authentic expressions of loss ever captured in music, but it’s made stronger thanks to the songs that surround it. The record is so well-paced, and it’s conscious build-up to that pivotal moment of loss makes the feelings Michelle’s depicting all the more raw and impactful. After that heaviness “Heft,” “Moon on the Bath,” and “Triple 7” act as a sort of post-script to death that sends the listener off on a (slightly) more hopeful note, though not by much. The fact that Michelle was able to fit all of those feelings into an album that’s shorter than most episodes of TV is nothing short of spectacular.

One of the reasons I love music is because it’s the only medium with the ability to make such a compelling depiction in such a short amount of time. TV shows and movies are great, but at best they take 2 hours to create a similar effect. I suppose you could make the argument that shorter-form art house movies broach a similar level of impact, but even then the two mediums don’t exist in the same quantities. There’s a more compelling narrative in the four and a half minutes of “Born to Run” than there was in whatever new teen drama Netflix shat out this weekend. There’s no comparison”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Jorge Fakhouri Filho/Pexels

Billboard talked about the advantages of longer albums at a time when you can get any album on Spotify for a fixed monthly subscription fee. Arriving in 2023, this is a relevant modern article that framed the discussion around the release of Country star Morgan Wallen’s (very long player!) One Thing at a Time album:

“One Thing at a Time undoubtedly benefited from its stats-padding length, but it still would have dominated the Billboard 200 had Wallen and his label, Big Loud Records, opted for an average length. With the bottom 18 tracks accounting for 36% of the album’s total on-demand streams, if One Thing were a single-CD, 18-track release, Billboard estimates it would have moved about 360,000 units last week — putting it well ahead of the No. 2 album, SOS by SZA. The 10 most popular tracks amounted to 41.8% of the album’s streams, with the track “Last Night” alone accounting for nearly 9% of the 36 tracks’ aggregated streams.

In fact, an 18-track One Thing at a Time would have bested most recent No. 1 albums in their debut weeks, including Lil Baby’s It’s Only Me (216,000 units), SOS (318,000 units), Metro Boomin’s Heroes & Villains (185,000 units) and Tomorrow X Together’s The Name Chapter: TEMPTATION (161,000 units). (That’s assuming One Thing at a Time would have sold the same number of CDs and digital albums with half as many songs.) Only two recent albums, Her Loss by Drake and 21 Savage (404,000 units) and Taylor Swift’s Midnights (1.58 million units), had better debut weeks than the hypothetical, 18-track One Thing at a Time.

One Thing at a Time is part of a curious paradox in current recorded music, as the widespread adoption of streaming services has caused artists to release single tracks more often while releasing increasingly lengthier albums, too. While the album is waning in popularity, it remains a vital artistic statement and commercial event.

The trend of longer albums runs counter to the experimentations of the early days of digital music. When Napster arrived in the late ’90s, many people believed file-sharing marked the death of the album format. In the ’00s, as consumers increasingly purchased individual tracks at online stores like Apple’s iTunes, labels experimented with the new paradigm. In 2005, Warner Music Group and Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman launched a digital-only label, Cordless Music, that released music exclusively in “clusters” of three or more songs instead of albums or singles. In 2010, country star Blake Shelton released two six-song EPs — called “six paks” — rather than a single 10- or 12-track album.

Today, streaming dominates music consumption and impacts how artists and labels package music. Album sales are lower than ever, but album lengths have never been longer. Because fans can stream an unlimited amount of music for a fixed price, artists can add songs knowing that a longer album equals more streams. And because streams tend to account for far more of an album’s chart position than downloads and purchases, artists have an incentive to keep people listening.

The result has been “track creep,” a consistently rising number of songs on popular albums. In 2022, the top 10 albums on the year-end Billboard 200 chart averaged 19.1 tracks and 69.9 minutes. The top album, Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti, has 23 tracks and runs 81 minutes. Un Verano Sin Ti is a product of the streaming age: Physical album sales account for just 1.1% of its album equivalent unit sales compared to 97.5% for streaming. Track creep is made easier considering that many albums, such as SOS and Drake’s 21-track Certified Lover Boy, don’t have physical versions.

Changes in how albums are counted for the Billboard 200 can probably help explain some of the track creep: In 2014, the year Billboard began incorporating streams into the Billboard 200 chart, the top 10 albums averaged 13.2 tracks and 51.9 minutes, meaning album lengths have increased by about six tracks and 18 minutes in the last eight years. (Here, Billboard counts only studio albums and excludes soundtracks and Broadway cast recordings, which are filled with score and instrumental tracks.)

In 1992, when CD sales began to dominate recorded music revenues, the top 10 albums averaged 11.9 tracks and 51.1 minutes. Garth Brooks had two of the four 10-track albums in the top 10 — Ropin’ the Wind and No Fences — and the longest, Totally Krossed Out by hip-hop duo Kriss Kross, had just 15 tracks. Albums -- particularly in the country genre -- often topped out at ten tracks, a limit set by record labels for paying mechanical royalties to music publishers.

Today, streaming dominates music consumption and impacts how artists and labels package music. Album sales are lower than ever, but album lengths have never been longer. Because fans can stream an unlimited amount of music for a fixed price, artists can add songs knowing that a longer album equals more streams. And because streams tend to account for far more of an album’s chart position than downloads and purchases, artists have an incentive to keep people listening”.

Particular people will have their views regarding whether longer albums are good value, or if they are a test of endurance. I personally like longer albums if they are affordable. You get a more complete – warts and all – view of an album. So many artists release a normal-length studio album. They then put an E.P. out soon after or before, so you get these tracks that would have been on an album arriving in a different format. People don’t really buy physical E.P.s - they can get them through Bandcamp and Spotify -, so I guess people need to consider the fact many artists who release shorter albums still put out a lot of music over the course of a year or two; though they are in the form of an album and then E.P. When albums can be streamed cheaply, artists have to make money through providing longer albums. It does mean fans shell out more though, with many artists putting out albums every couple of few years, it is not a massive expenditure if you think about it. Mae Muller’s recent post ‘defending’ her expansive debut, Sorry I’m Late, raises an interesting point. She has started a debate that has arrived at…

JUST the right time!

Sam Liddicott