From Taylor Swift to Beyoncé, albums are getting longer and messier. Blame Big Tech.
Tyler Le/BI
In June, the pop artist Charli XCX released her sixth studio album, "Brat." A few days later, she released a second version, with three more songs, and cheekily called it "Brat and it's the same but there's three more songs so it's not." Some speculated this was a dig at Taylor Swift, whose album rereleases have drawn criticism by some who see them as a push to stay atop the charts. Really it was a nod to the same game many big artists are playing today: rolling out a tidal wave of iterations of albums and songs as they seek to grab attention and please the algorithmic gods on crowded apps like Spotify and TikTok.
"Everybody's playing a streaming game," said Nima Nasseri, a former A&R lead at Universal Music Group who manages the music producer and artist Hit-Boy.
In the streaming era, more is more, and the biggest stars in pop are fully embracing the never-ending album-release cycle — as well as nearly never-ending albums. Country artist Morgan Wallen's 2023 album "One Thing at a Time" clocked in at 36 tracks. In March, Beyoncé released 27 songs for "Cowboy Carter." In April, Swift gave her fans two hours to comb through her 16-track album, "The Tortured Poets Department," before unloading an additional 15 songs in an anthology edition just a few hours later. The music executive Nathan Hubbard, who podcasts for The Ringer and was trying to review Swift's first version when he got hit with the second, described the onslaught as a "hostage situation."
Swift has since released more than 30 different iterations of "Tortured Poets" in the form of remixes, vinyl editions, cassettes, and first-draft phone memos. In May, Billie Eilish released nine vinyl editions, four CDs, and a slew of sped-up and slowed-down versions of songs from her album "Hit Me Hard and Soft."
"It's a very momentum-driven market," said Ben Klein, the cofounder at the record label and music-marketing firm Hundred Days. And when an artist has momentum, he said, "you want to really capitalize on that by putting out as much product as possible."
Long albums can feel like a sprawling mess, particularly as most TikTok-era listeners rarely take time to play even full songs, never mind 31-track sagas. But while they grate on casual listeners, and critics, they can also delight superfans who take pleasure in conducting forensic analysis on lyrics while buying limited-edition vinyls to hang on their walls. "If you have the power to do so, small changes to the format or capsuled editions allow for artists to continue to satisfy their rabid fan bases," said David O'Connor, the vice president of artist and business development at Live Nation Entertainment. For megastars, the real money is in catering to their base.
What these trends ultimately reveal is how a handful of tech platforms like Spotify and TikTok continue to dramatically shape how music is made and consumed today. No artist, no matter how big, can ignore the algorithm.
Gen Z was too young to remember this, but not long ago, if you wanted to hear a song and it wasn't on the radio, the only way was to go to a store and buy a full album.
For decades, the record industry's stranglehold on music distribution kept record sales growing at a healthy clip, peaking in the US at about $15 billion in 1999 (some $27 billion in today's dollars). But Napster arrived that same year, bringing illegal music downloads into the mainstream. In 2003, Apple's iTunes music store began selling individual songs for about a dollar, returning some revenue back to rights holders but further diminishing the album's position as music gatekeeper.
"Steve Jobs radically remapped the music industry," said Robert Fink, a professor of musicology and the music-industry program chair at UCLA's Herb Alpert School of Music. "He arguably saved the record business by creating a store where people would actually pay $0.99 for a song as opposed to zero. That was great. But what he also did is he re-created the singles format. You could just buy the one song."
Some artists even admit to thinking about TikTokable moments during the songwriting process.
The album took another blow with the arrival of playlists on subscription streaming services like Spotify. And now, in the attention-span-depleted TikTok era of music discovery, the most meme-able 15 seconds of a song have started to matter more than the full track, much less a full album. Some artists even admit to thinking about TikTokable moments during the songwriting process. As it has with politics and news, the sound-bite-ification of social media has come for music.
"Most of my fans aren't really looking for an album," said Charlie Green, an artist and YouTuber who performs under the stage name CG5. "In the music industry today it's very important to just see how your singles do, and if they do well, then you release an album."
"It's a little bit of the Wild West when it comes to why we release tracks on certain artists and albums on the other," Taylor Lindsey, a senior vice president of A&R at Sony Music Nashville, said. "So much of it is just about artist preference and also where they are in their careers. But in the same breath, because we are in a world where there are 100,000 tracks uploaded to digital streaming platforms per day, and because the attention span is like 2.5 seconds, there's this sense of, 'You need more.'"
Still, for some artists, albums can be a useful tool for marketing, streaming economics, and nourishing their biggest fans. More tracks on an album can also help it have the best chance at breaking through.
"The more songs on an album, the more bites at the apple for editorial and user playlisting and the potential for higher first-week sales," said Brian Zisook, the head of artist and label services and executive vice president of global operations at the music-streaming platform Audiomack.
"There's just less cost-prohibitive reasons to not put more songs on a record," said Audrey Benoualid, a music lawyer at the firm Myman Greenspan who has worked with artists like Ariana Grande and Tate McRae. "If you're capturing all of your fans and the fans are streaming 10 songs or they're streaming 30 songs, it actually makes a big difference on charting and streaming revenue."
Of course, writing lots of quality songs for an album is easier said than done. And some artists are wary of letting social-media strategies or streaming incentives bleed into the creative process.
Performers, whether indie artists or chart-topping pop stars, know digital virality can be fleeting and many listeners will hear their music only once. What matters more for their long-term careers is building an audience of superfans. That's where albums can really shine.
"Our core fan, as far as people that are buying meet-and-greet tickets to Judah & the Lion shows, I do think that they love records," said Judah Akers, a singer and guitarist in the folk band Judah & the Lion, which released a 19-track album called "The Process" in May.
Superfans are the listeners most likely to buy concert tickets, drive repeat Apple Music streams, and shell out money for physical records that they can listen to or frame as a wall hanging. The resurgence of vinyl sales as a fan collectible in recent years reflects that. US revenue from vinyl records, CDs, and other physical formats grew to $1.91 billion last year, a 10% increase from 2022, per data compiled by the RIAA. According to entertainment industry data firm Luminate, the top 10 best-selling albums of 2024 had an average of seven vinyl releases, 13 CDs, and two cassettes.
"The album as a form is simultaneously dying and living its best life," said Marie Clausen, a managing director at the record label Ninja Tune. "Now that music discovery is driven so much by TikTok and shorts and reels, it is really important to offer these real-life touch points or experiences basically where you can hold a record in your hand."
Like their counterparts in pop, Akers' band plans to release an extended deluxe version of "The Process" with five additional songs later this year. He hopes fans will try to guess how those added tracks fit into the album's broader storyline, which tackles the artist's and his cowriter's experiences with grief.
"A 24-song record is like feeding someone a full-course meal and then giving them free desserts," Akers said. "It could be too much. But I think for us, since this record is so important to us, we want to keep pointing our fans back."
With no physical bounds, an album today can really be whatever an artist wants it to be (even if the nebulous shape of it can make it a moving target for music critics).
"What defines an album is entirely up to the artist," said Nathan Hubbard. "I think constraints can breed creativity, and historically they have. But I think that the removal of those constraints has given artists the ability to just create on their own terms and to define whatever an album is for them."
Dan Whateley is a senior media reporter at Business Insider covering social media and the music business.
