The Rise of the Stream

10–12 tracks and under, that is my ideal length for an album. One of the greatest albums ever created from top to bottom is Thriller by Michael Jackson, 9 tracks lasting 42 minutes and 19 seconds. Each song is a banger, no fluff, just the cream of the crop. Try and point out a bad song on that album…I’m waiting and so are these hands if you come back with anything other than, “nope you’re right these are all bangers”. This was Michael and Quincy Jones at their peak and boy they knew how to make a dope album. The duo went through 700 song demos for the album and eventually turned that into 9 songs. Now that is what I call a successful cull, anybody who has struggled with deleting photos from a trip, knows what I’m talking about. This was a different era, an era when artists strived for the diamond and platinum album. Now, can you remember anyone talking about making or celebrating platinum (1 million copies) or diamond (10 million copies) albums in the past couple of years? Yeah, me neither. It was also an era of music where artists like Michael were limited by the storage capacity of CDs.
Now let’s fast forward to 2017, a new era in music where artists are starting to look for streaming numbers instead album sales. Audiences have shifted from buying albums (RIP HMV) to using one of the many popular music streaming sites and services to listen to their music, such as Youtube, SoundCloud, Spotify, Apple Music, Google Music and Tidal (Alright lets be real, no one is using Tidal but I had to put it here because of Hov).
A perfect example of an artist that is trying to take advantage of this new streaming era is Drake, one of the most popular artists of all time. With his three past albums and more specifically Views and More Life, Drake was not after the platinum album like Michael, he wanted to break streaming records and he did. Instead of the traditional album sales metric that ruled the music industry for decades, headlines touted More Life’s number of streams globally which was 89.9 million in the first 24 hours just on Apple Music alone.
This shift in the culture has made some artists rethink album composition, the more songs on your album, the more streams you get, which means more revenue and more exposure. With album sales going the way of the Dodo bird, streams have become a viable way for artists (especially popular ones) to make money that is not through merchandise, advertising and concert sales. 19, 20 and 22, those are the number of tracks in Drake’s next three albums after Nothing Was The Same (his best album to date, come at me if you disagree), which also happened to coincide with the music streaming boom. I highly doubt one the smartest hip hop artist of all time in terms of marketing and popularity, did that by accident. Drake was smart; he realized the changing landscape and was one of the first to shift accordingly and he has reaped the financial benefits for doing so. Though some would argue (myself included) in exchange for quality. We are no longer held to CD storage capacity like in the time of Michael, remember making those mix CDs and pulling your hair out trying to decide which songs made the cut? Well those days are over, we now have phones that can store 64 GBs of songs and some artists are taking advantage of that new found freedom.
And by no means, am I saying this is a negative or a positive, or that every artist will start making 25 song albums. It’s just the evolution of music distribution. Personally, I am a major proponent for small albums, I love them! But I will never say it’s the way you must create an album, that’s the beautiful thing about music, it’s about the creativity of an artist (Or their team, cough, cough, One Direction, cough). Some of my favourite albums are long, such as Kanye West’s Late Registration and Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid M.A.A.D. City. But unlike Views or More Life, both of those albums feel like such a tight package. I could listen to those albums on repeat from start to finish. While with Views and More Life, I’m hitting the skip button constantly and feel that half of the album is just filler. That may be more of a taste thing and I could be overthinking this entire thing, but that’s why music is great, it can be objective but really it’s subjective and ever changing. Nothing in music is stagnant, it’s always evolving, and we have just entered the new era of music streaming.
I look forward to seeing Drake eventually come out with his 45 song magnum opus in 7 years that lasts two hours and for Kendrick to do the exact opposite and release a 3 song, 10 minute album where he finds a way to rap over heavy metal. If he did it with jazz then anything is possible!