I used to work in the music industry professionally, on the ground level doing booking and management. This trend has been happening slowly for nearly a decade but it’s finally here. Rap and Hip Hop figured out a long time before most other genres that rapid small releases was a far better way to keep hype and sales up. Before Spotify was a thing, the shift was happening with YouTube but it wasn’t as predominant. Now it’s basically assumed you’ll be releasing singles every month.
The music isn’t your product, the music is your marketing. The shows, the merch, your influence - that’s your product.
The way in which Spotify (and other streaming services) hurts the development of music isn’t what most people say.
The problem with per-stream plays is that it is based on pop music logic: more streams
equals more money.
Fair!
But many recording artists made a modest living by releasing music that you might not want to listen to over and over and over. This music is often labeled ‘art’ or ‘experimental’ or whatever, and for the enthusiast, paying $15 for a record of this stuff was great.
Streaming services have no answer for this problem. It’s up to something like Patreon, if anything, to fill this gap.
This is all sorta fine, but what grates in me is that it seems none of the streaming providers have even thought about this. They just don’t seem to be that in to music, and just think of types of pop music as representing all of music.
This is where that above quote is just a little irritating.
If I pay $10 and listen to 50 tracks, I want $10 (minus the provides fee) to be split among precisely those 50 tracks.
The difference is if you only listed to 50 tracks your listens are worth more that someone that diluted their listens over 5000.
Throwing everyone's fees into one big vat and dividing that according to the total listens, is bullshit. I want my favorite artist to be paid by me and I don't want to subsidize the worlds most popular artists that I never listen to.
Streaming services (music, movies, books, etc.) are completely user-centric. It’s one place for you to consume your content. Discovery was never great there.
I prefer the Kanye West model in which every 8 months or so you promise to release an album on a specific date. Then that date comes and you go completely MIA, and pretend you never even announced the album. Then a few weeks later once all the hype has turned to dismay you quietly release the album and the dismay turns back into hype. Maybe that model only works if you're Kanye though.
Kanye West is a singular being. He is a human work of art, this generation’s Warhol. Perhaps even more fascinating than Warhol, if less self-aware. I’m a huge fan of his brilliant public trajectory, yet I despise his music.
Kanye West was the first big artist I know to really utilize The new release model to break out of the old formula of releasing an album and then it’s done.
It was fascinating when Life of Pablo was released on Spotify and over the next few months was given continuous updates and patches, like it had been software.
Really proves the old proverb that great art never is finished, it’s abandoned...
Obviously the guy knows nothing about creativity and art.
It takes time to grow as a person and cultivate new ideas. It may not be possible to do that if you don't get in and out of whatever it is you're doing.
Imagine telling Hemingway he has to release a new blog post every week instead of a book every couple of years.
"What's he going to record a song about?"
"Nothing."
"Spotify'll kill him."
"I guess they will."
"He must have got mixed up in something with the music industry."
"I guess so," said Nick.
"It's a hell of a thing."
"It's an awful thing," Nick said.
They did not say anything. George reached down for his mobile phone and wiped the screen.
"I wonder what he did?" Nick said.
"Failed to write enough songs fast enough to generate user engagement. That's what Spotify will kill them for."
"I'm going to cancel my Spotify subscription," Nick said.
"Yes," said George. "That's a good thing to do."
"I can't stand to think about him waiting in the recording room and knowing he's going to get it. It's too damned awful."
"Well," said George, "you better not think about it."
I don't know if this was intended sarcastically, but novels written in a weekly serialized form were a huge thing [0] and Hemingway wrote at least one novel this way [1].
What’s especially funny about your example is Hemingway wrote for periodicals as a day job for a long time, and so he kept that kind of schedule.
Except some of his books came about because he didn’t keep to that schedule, and we don’t usually talk about Hemingway for his articles in the Toronto Star.
Obviously the guy knows nothing about creativity and art.
He's not telling bands how to be successful artistically, he's telling them how to be successful financially in the modern music world.
If the band is only interested in promoting their art, they can do anything they want. If they want to earn a living too, they need to provide the market what it wants.
> Imagine telling Hemingway he has to release a new blog post every week instead of a book every couple of years.
In his prime writing period he was closer to the former than the latter; between 1923 and 1933 he published, it looks like, at least 49 short stories, 10 poems, 3 novels, and two nonfiction books. At least one of the novels was initially released in serialized form over 6 months of magazine issues.
I think he just sees the norms of traditional songwriting as not his job. If I'm the CEO of Chipotle, I'm going to focus on getting my customers good food at reasonable prices, and I'm not gonna take it tremendously seriously if chefs complain they can't express creativity well in my kitchens.
I'm almost sure he knows all of that about creativity and art, and simply does not care. He has instead decided that he is going to try to commodify music, and this is the result. Factory-farmed music benefits the distributors over the artists, after all, because it's reliable.
Spotify is not for putting out art, it's for generating buzz about your art so you can get paid for it later.
If your goal is the best art you can produce, then perhaps Spotify and that roller coaster isn't what you should care about.
If you want to good art while also also getting a lot of buzz so you can make money or be popular, then you need to deal with market forces, just like everyone always has.
Different artists will value to varying degrees generating good art, exposing many people to that art, and getting paid well. All those goals are related, but I doubt any one of them can be maximized without concessions from others.
> Imagine telling Hemingway he has to release a new blog post every week instead of a book every couple of years.
Authors release at their own schedule if they don't rely on the money from the books, they have other income, or they've already made enough to be secure. Hemingway is not really different. Neither is any other already famous artist.
> Imagine telling Hemingway he has to release a new blog post every week instead of a book every couple of years.
Hemingway's fiction in particular aside, it is worth noting that many of the novel-length works now considered classics were actually created and released as a series of shorter works, often to fairly strict deadlines:
> Imagine telling Hemingway he has to release a new blog post every week instead of a book every couple of years.
It's much easier when there are literally thousands of song writers trying to get a label or famous singer to use their song. The Nashville model is pretty much everywhere now.
It also helps that we've been able to computationally determine which parameters and heuristics are most likely to end up as a hit. There's a reason popular music across genres all more or less sounds the same today (loud, compressed with little dynamic range, auto-tuned, 4 chords, etc), with the difference between them being the style they are in.
It's about releasing, not creating. If you write 12 good songs a year on average, you can release 1/month. It doesn't matter if you actually write one song per month, or write and record them all in one frantic week, and then spend 51 weeks growing as a person and cultivating new ideas.
I wish more people, especially tech CEOs, could understand the incredible sacrifice of time, money, and energy it takes to make an album people actually enjoy. Everything you listen to, unless you are willing to listen to raw demos, is a miracle. I've worked both as a sound engineer and and a software developer. It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record. The way tech companies have abused musicians to get rich is one of the most shameful things to ever happen. Furthermore, I'm sick of these guru edicts about how everyone will need to work that much harder in the "new normal". I got into software to pay the bills, but the way geeks talk about the industry and people I love drives me right up the wall. Have some appreciation--even awe--for the art you enjoy. It requires more effort than you could ever imagine.
> It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record.
That's apples-to-oranges. Obviously a "hit" anything is hard in any field, by definition. A hit app is just as hard (even harder, probably, since there are a lot less hit apps than hit songs).
But producing a single track? Seriously, it's not that hard. Yes, it takes a team of people and a lot of creativity and skill, but I don't know what this "incredible sacrifice" or "miracle" that is "more effort than you could ever imagine" is that you're talking about. It's a creative project like any other.
But that's not even the point of the article, which is simply to release tracks piecemeal and regularly rather than in an album only occasionally. There's nothing about everyone working "that much harder".
It sounds like you had a hard time in the biz, and I'm sorry. But I don't have any clue who the "geeks" are who "talk about the industry" that seems to bother you so much, and which doesn't seem to have anything to do with the article. I know a lot of software engineers who are also really into the indie music scene in Brooklyn and I think everyone does understand the work bands put into their music and their touring, and that most of the bands are never going to make it beyond attracting a few dozen or couple hundred audience members at any show, but they do it because they love it.
> It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record.
True, but hardly apples-to-apples; it's orders of magnitude easier to make music than it is to make a viral app. In either case, the barrier to entry is low, the standard for doing it professionally is surprisingly high, and making a hit is a huge undertaking.
I highly recommend The Song Machine (Inside the Hit Factory) by John Seabrook. The author describes the modern reincarnation of the Brill Building that pumps out pop hits using methods that we would not call songwriting (Max Martin, Dr. Luke, etc.). The goal is to get you to listen to 30 seconds of a song (that counts as a spin on digital streaming services). They've decomposed the process into mass production of backing tracks (using pro tools) which then get handed to so-called topliners that add the "hook" (the catchy part of the song). They stick the famous artist at the beginning of the song to get you past the 30 second threshold.
I think what the CEO is saying, and it has been an increasing trend in music for a long time now, is moving even further away from large LP releases every few years. The existence of that medium of music doesn't make sense in the current year given how people actually go about consuming music.
The way to keep fans engaged involves releasing EPs and Single on a regular basis, releasing a whole album only really makes sense in the context of trying to produce it for artistic value, not fan engagement value.
As a visual artist who regularly works on multi-year projects, and happily grabs a new album from bands she's been following for years who only put new work out once in a blue moon, I would like to cordially invite Mr. Ek to fuck himself.
While I am handing out invitations to auto-copulation, I would also like to hand out a large number to every senator and representative who has voted to defund the arts. Making room for people who have learnt creative skills to pursue their craft without having to constantly worry about whether or not this week's piece is gonna make enough money for them to pay their rent is an important part of society.
Finally, I should express my absolute delight that Patreon continues to exist, and that I have enough people willing to spare a few bucks per month that I can pay my rent while continuing to work on my long, slow projects. I keep on worrying that Patreon will fall apart when it becomes clear that their burn rate is higher than their profits, but I will enjoy it while I still can. It's about the closest thing to the NEA I'm likely to experience in my adult life.
"The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans. It is about putting the work in, about the storytelling around the album, and about keeping a continuous dialogue with your fans."
Translation: We don't have a marketing department to handle this royal pain-in-the-ass for you, like a record company would've in the old days. Selling stuff still requires marketing though, so the people who do well are the ones who handle that part themselves, along with making the music. If you're not good at wearing all the hats at once (for example you're amazing at music and not particularly at marketing) well I guess you don't belong in the new future landscape.
Corollary: This future landscape tends naturally toward being filled with mediocre musicians who work at it part-time - almost like a moonlighting side gig to their marketing jobs.
Ugh, I very much do not want musicians feeling forced to churn out more content on a set schedule. I don't get how anyone could look at the current music landscape and think that what we need is more quantity, at the expense of quality. Pushing for more new content is going to encourage more derivative low effort songs, and less original ideas.
> Ek claimed that a "narrative fallacy" had been created and caused music fans to believe that Spotify doesn't pay musicians enough for streams of their music.
Fallacy? Scores of well-known musicians, from Bette Midler to Taylor Swift, have talked about how little they make through Spotify and other streaming platforms. IIRC Swift only joined the platform after cutting a special deal. Not everyone can do this. Quoting the guitarist for Mastodon, which has a much smaller following (https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/07/05/mastodon-guitari...):
I could live a thousand years, and Spotify plays [our music] all day long, and maybe I’ll just make a couple of thousand dollars.
Ek also said this:
> "Some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape," Ek said, "where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.”
This quote reminded me of Joni Mitchell, who would take years-long breaks earlier in her career to escape from the business, work on songwriting, and recharge. Many other musicians can't, as Ek puts it, "create a continuous engagement with their fans" for reasons related to privacy, family life, finances, or mental health.
It's bad enough Spotify pays artists peanuts. But if Ek is tuning his platform to benefit only those artists who are willing to jump through Spotify's algorithmically generated hoops, and sideline everyone else, then the future of the music industry looks very dim.
Based on the Spotify revenue model my favourite artist might make a few dollars off me over our entire lifetimes. This is not enough to sustain all but the biggest artists. I am happy to contribute more to smaller artists I appreciate. Seeing them on tour, buying CDs, buying merch, patreon type models and even straight up contributions on paypal and venmo. I've been buying a couple hundred bucks worth every bandcamp Friday since the start of covid. It is not just Spotify, none of the streaming fremium music subscription services provide me an effective way to support the artists I like.
Cory Doctorow points the way in Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free talking about future models for artists to make a living. It might superficially seem like the Spotify CEO is saying the same things but this is just cover for the gatekeepers to keep an unconscionable share for themselves.
I used to hunt for music and movies. I was an enthusiastic movie and music fan. But these days, I mostly give up. I listen to underground/indie artists and some classical music. I ignore popular music and movies, especially those promoted on big platforms like Spotify.
It's sad that many talented artists are brainwashed by these big platforms. They chase after big money. They don't produce anything original.
I disagree. Musicians can do whatever they want. Not very many musicians spend their time riding a perpetual wave that they have to continually feed. Spotify benefits the most from this churn.
> The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans. It is about putting the work in, about the storytelling around the album, and about keeping a continuous dialogue with your fans.
Maybe if you want to be mega-successful, but I have to believe there's room for other approaches too. My favorite band that I've discovered since joining Spotify is Darkwater. They have three albums (2007, 2010, and 2019). Right now, this is the only band I would absolutely make sure to see if they tour within a couple 100 miles. I have to believe they're paying the bills without too much trouble.
In the vinyl era, when a single LP was about 40 minutes long, it was pretty normal for artists to release roughly an album a year. (e.g. Led Zeppelin's eight studio albums were released over a span of 10.5 years, but one was a double album and they took a long break when Robert Plant's son died. The first 7 albums were released over 7 years).
It seems like it was only when albums started to be recorded for the longer CD format (75 min or so) that the time between albums seemed to increase, as if artists felt they needed to have enough material to fill a substantial fraction of a CD's capacity before releasing.
Now that we're in the streaming era, there isn't any particular container size to "fill" to make an album, so there isn't any particular reason for bands to wait long periods, except for their own creative cycles. The notion of an "album" isn't really constrained by any physical limits anymore and it's really just "a bunch of songs released together".
I think the Ek's statements just reflect the fact that it's easier to be successful if you're prolific, and the the new model actually pays when people listen (roughly speaking), rather than just when they buy.
That's a strange stance. I assume there are a fair number of listeners that don't care to listen to anything new. Is there some business benefit to Spotify by artificially forcing churn?
As my musician friend told me ->
“In music, you don’t get to update your songs. Once it’s out, it’s there for the world to see.” (Or something like that.)
It’s not like software where we can iterate/improve as we learn. In music, you capture a moment, a sensation, an experience - and you had better capture it as intended, even if that means an extra month in the studio.
This same musician told me that the increased ubiquity of singles is intended to speed up iteration/feedback/ship cycles.
It's interesting cause Kanye intentionally or unintentionally experimented with updating Life of Pablo several times. He changed track order, changed the production, changed the lyrics a bit. I believe he released 4 different versions.
It was super interesting at the time and a lot of internet music circles were talking about the potential of this going forward considering it's only possible because of the streaming services. But unfortunately it didn't seem to catch on and I haven't seen any other examples.
[+] [-] shakezula|5 years ago|reply
The music isn’t your product, the music is your marketing. The shows, the merch, your influence - that’s your product.
[+] [-] whiddershins|5 years ago|reply
The problem with per-stream plays is that it is based on pop music logic: more streams equals more money. Fair!
But many recording artists made a modest living by releasing music that you might not want to listen to over and over and over. This music is often labeled ‘art’ or ‘experimental’ or whatever, and for the enthusiast, paying $15 for a record of this stuff was great.
Streaming services have no answer for this problem. It’s up to something like Patreon, if anything, to fill this gap.
This is all sorta fine, but what grates in me is that it seems none of the streaming providers have even thought about this. They just don’t seem to be that in to music, and just think of types of pop music as representing all of music.
This is where that above quote is just a little irritating.
[+] [-] swinglock|5 years ago|reply
If I pay $10 and listen to 50 tracks, I want $10 (minus the provides fee) to be split among precisely those 50 tracks.
The difference is if you only listed to 50 tracks your listens are worth more that someone that diluted their listens over 5000.
Throwing everyone's fees into one big vat and dividing that according to the total listens, is bullshit. I want my favorite artist to be paid by me and I don't want to subsidize the worlds most popular artists that I never listen to.
[+] [-] dinglejungle|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baby|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcbadacd|5 years ago|reply
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-52393960
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] HeadsUpHigh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdoliner|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haram_masala|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rikroots|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Reimersholme|5 years ago|reply
It was fascinating when Life of Pablo was released on Spotify and over the next few months was given continuous updates and patches, like it had been software.
Really proves the old proverb that great art never is finished, it’s abandoned...
[+] [-] jedimastert|5 years ago|reply
(But yeah it's messed up just don't put out dates)
[+] [-] pier25|5 years ago|reply
It takes time to grow as a person and cultivate new ideas. It may not be possible to do that if you don't get in and out of whatever it is you're doing.
Imagine telling Hemingway he has to release a new blog post every week instead of a book every couple of years.
[+] [-] the_af|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcor84|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_%28literature%29
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Across_the_River_and_into_the_...
[+] [-] 52-6F-62|5 years ago|reply
Except some of his books came about because he didn’t keep to that schedule, and we don’t usually talk about Hemingway for his articles in the Toronto Star.
[+] [-] Johnny555|5 years ago|reply
He's not telling bands how to be successful artistically, he's telling them how to be successful financially in the modern music world.
If the band is only interested in promoting their art, they can do anything they want. If they want to earn a living too, they need to provide the market what it wants.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|5 years ago|reply
In his prime writing period he was closer to the former than the latter; between 1923 and 1933 he published, it looks like, at least 49 short stories, 10 poems, 3 novels, and two nonfiction books. At least one of the novels was initially released in serialized form over 6 months of magazine issues.
[+] [-] SpicyLemonZest|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NamTaf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbenson|5 years ago|reply
If your goal is the best art you can produce, then perhaps Spotify and that roller coaster isn't what you should care about.
If you want to good art while also also getting a lot of buzz so you can make money or be popular, then you need to deal with market forces, just like everyone always has.
Different artists will value to varying degrees generating good art, exposing many people to that art, and getting paid well. All those goals are related, but I doubt any one of them can be maximized without concessions from others.
> Imagine telling Hemingway he has to release a new blog post every week instead of a book every couple of years.
Authors release at their own schedule if they don't rely on the money from the books, they have other income, or they've already made enough to be secure. Hemingway is not really different. Neither is any other already famous artist.
[+] [-] chesterarthur|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] webmaven|5 years ago|reply
Hemingway's fiction in particular aside, it is worth noting that many of the novel-length works now considered classics were actually created and released as a series of shorter works, often to fairly strict deadlines:
https://booksonthewall.com/blog/serial-novel-a-brief-history...
[+] [-] nemo44x|5 years ago|reply
It's much easier when there are literally thousands of song writers trying to get a label or famous singer to use their song. The Nashville model is pretty much everywhere now.
It also helps that we've been able to computationally determine which parameters and heuristics are most likely to end up as a hit. There's a reason popular music across genres all more or less sounds the same today (loud, compressed with little dynamic range, auto-tuned, 4 chords, etc), with the difference between them being the style they are in.
[+] [-] mkl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rubidium|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aglavine|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NikolaeVarius|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alchemyromcom|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|5 years ago|reply
That's apples-to-oranges. Obviously a "hit" anything is hard in any field, by definition. A hit app is just as hard (even harder, probably, since there are a lot less hit apps than hit songs).
But producing a single track? Seriously, it's not that hard. Yes, it takes a team of people and a lot of creativity and skill, but I don't know what this "incredible sacrifice" or "miracle" that is "more effort than you could ever imagine" is that you're talking about. It's a creative project like any other.
But that's not even the point of the article, which is simply to release tracks piecemeal and regularly rather than in an album only occasionally. There's nothing about everyone working "that much harder".
It sounds like you had a hard time in the biz, and I'm sorry. But I don't have any clue who the "geeks" are who "talk about the industry" that seems to bother you so much, and which doesn't seem to have anything to do with the article. I know a lot of software engineers who are also really into the indie music scene in Brooklyn and I think everyone does understand the work bands put into their music and their touring, and that most of the bands are never going to make it beyond attracting a few dozen or couple hundred audience members at any show, but they do it because they love it.
[+] [-] yjftsjthsd-h|5 years ago|reply
True, but hardly apples-to-apples; it's orders of magnitude easier to make music than it is to make a viral app. In either case, the barrier to entry is low, the standard for doing it professionally is surprisingly high, and making a hit is a huge undertaking.
[+] [-] hardtke|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zjaffee|5 years ago|reply
The way to keep fans engaged involves releasing EPs and Single on a regular basis, releasing a whole album only really makes sense in the context of trying to produce it for artistic value, not fan engagement value.
[+] [-] egypturnash|5 years ago|reply
While I am handing out invitations to auto-copulation, I would also like to hand out a large number to every senator and representative who has voted to defund the arts. Making room for people who have learnt creative skills to pursue their craft without having to constantly worry about whether or not this week's piece is gonna make enough money for them to pay their rent is an important part of society.
Finally, I should express my absolute delight that Patreon continues to exist, and that I have enough people willing to spare a few bucks per month that I can pay my rent while continuing to work on my long, slow projects. I keep on worrying that Patreon will fall apart when it becomes clear that their burn rate is higher than their profits, but I will enjoy it while I still can. It's about the closest thing to the NEA I'm likely to experience in my adult life.
[+] [-] rdiddly|5 years ago|reply
Translation: We don't have a marketing department to handle this royal pain-in-the-ass for you, like a record company would've in the old days. Selling stuff still requires marketing though, so the people who do well are the ones who handle that part themselves, along with making the music. If you're not good at wearing all the hats at once (for example you're amazing at music and not particularly at marketing) well I guess you don't belong in the new future landscape.
Corollary: This future landscape tends naturally toward being filled with mediocre musicians who work at it part-time - almost like a moonlighting side gig to their marketing jobs.
[+] [-] rurp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilamont|5 years ago|reply
Fallacy? Scores of well-known musicians, from Bette Midler to Taylor Swift, have talked about how little they make through Spotify and other streaming platforms. IIRC Swift only joined the platform after cutting a special deal. Not everyone can do this. Quoting the guitarist for Mastodon, which has a much smaller following (https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/07/05/mastodon-guitari...):
I could live a thousand years, and Spotify plays [our music] all day long, and maybe I’ll just make a couple of thousand dollars.
Ek also said this:
> "Some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape," Ek said, "where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.”
This quote reminded me of Joni Mitchell, who would take years-long breaks earlier in her career to escape from the business, work on songwriting, and recharge. Many other musicians can't, as Ek puts it, "create a continuous engagement with their fans" for reasons related to privacy, family life, finances, or mental health.
It's bad enough Spotify pays artists peanuts. But if Ek is tuning his platform to benefit only those artists who are willing to jump through Spotify's algorithmically generated hoops, and sideline everyone else, then the future of the music industry looks very dim.
[+] [-] unnamed76ri|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bondolo|5 years ago|reply
Cory Doctorow points the way in Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free talking about future models for artists to make a living. It might superficially seem like the Spotify CEO is saying the same things but this is just cover for the gatekeepers to keep an unconscionable share for themselves.
[+] [-] _7fvc|5 years ago|reply
It's sad that many talented artists are brainwashed by these big platforms. They chase after big money. They don't produce anything original.
I think the same thing is happening to software.
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] default-kramer|5 years ago|reply
Maybe if you want to be mega-successful, but I have to believe there's room for other approaches too. My favorite band that I've discovered since joining Spotify is Darkwater. They have three albums (2007, 2010, and 2019). Right now, this is the only band I would absolutely make sure to see if they tour within a couple 100 miles. I have to believe they're paying the bills without too much trouble.
[+] [-] jp57|5 years ago|reply
In the vinyl era, when a single LP was about 40 minutes long, it was pretty normal for artists to release roughly an album a year. (e.g. Led Zeppelin's eight studio albums were released over a span of 10.5 years, but one was a double album and they took a long break when Robert Plant's son died. The first 7 albums were released over 7 years).
It seems like it was only when albums started to be recorded for the longer CD format (75 min or so) that the time between albums seemed to increase, as if artists felt they needed to have enough material to fill a substantial fraction of a CD's capacity before releasing.
Now that we're in the streaming era, there isn't any particular container size to "fill" to make an album, so there isn't any particular reason for bands to wait long periods, except for their own creative cycles. The notion of an "album" isn't really constrained by any physical limits anymore and it's really just "a bunch of songs released together".
I think the Ek's statements just reflect the fact that it's easier to be successful if you're prolific, and the the new model actually pays when people listen (roughly speaking), rather than just when they buy.
[edit: punctuation]
[+] [-] avidphantasm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ses1984|5 years ago|reply
How many of those artists continuously engage with the community? How many were famous before Spotify existed?
[+] [-] arthurofbabylon|5 years ago|reply
It’s not like software where we can iterate/improve as we learn. In music, you capture a moment, a sensation, an experience - and you had better capture it as intended, even if that means an extra month in the studio.
This same musician told me that the increased ubiquity of singles is intended to speed up iteration/feedback/ship cycles.
[+] [-] tguedes|5 years ago|reply
It was super interesting at the time and a lot of internet music circles were talking about the potential of this going forward considering it's only possible because of the streaming services. But unfortunately it didn't seem to catch on and I haven't seen any other examples.