The Life Expectancy of New Albums is Catastrophically Low
I never thought there’d be a time where a new J. Cole album would come and go as quick as it did. I mean Jermaine Cole, Mr “Platinum with no features”, nearly 400k units in first week sales back in 2018, released a new album and it only stayed the topic of conversation for less than a month. It’s not like the album was subpar by any stretch of the imagination; The Off-Season features some of the best rapping that we’ve heard from Cole in his entire career. The North Carolina native pursued his basketball dreams in the middle of his album rollout, as he joined the Rwanda Patriots BBC in the Africa League. This garnered plenty of publicity for himself and the new album, as he accrued a whopping 325 million on-demand streams in the album’s first week. But just as quick as we got the project, is how quick we all seem to have moved on.
J. Cole’s new album is no anomaly; the growing trend in music is that no matter how great an album is, the focus shifts away from it in just a few week’s time. Sure, fans may still regularly listen to their favorite new albums, but those projects won’t be the regular topic of conversation as they once were. The life expectancy of albums is simply at a catastrophic low. The question that I, and plenty of music fans have at the moment is: why?
The answer to that may be multi-faceted.
A keen example of this shortened album life expectancy is what happened with Childish Gambino last year. It still baffles me that Donald Glover, who shocked the world with his abstract “Awaken, My Love!” release in 2016, put out such an impressive follow-up body of work in 2020 and nobody spoke about it. Childish of course didn’t do himself any favors by having a blank white cover art, an unmemorable album title (3.15.20), and song titles that were simply codes (35.31, for example), but this album was still quite remarkable. His song-making ability is at the peak of his career, and the overall sound stretches everywhere from smooth to abstract R&B. It remains one of my most listened to albums since it’s release because of the amount of replay value it has.
But just like the hundreds of other albums released that year, the project simply came and went like the rest of them. After some initial promotion on the artist’s side, and the music news outlets sharing their album reviews, these albums end up gone with the wind.
Surely The Weeknd knew how to market his album. He had a successful rollout for his critically acclaimed release “After Hours” in March of 2020. But unlike Childish Gambino, the promo didn’t stop upon release. With several billboard charting singles, progressively releasing music videos, exclusive merchandise drops, and various award show performances, he kept the album alive into the following year. He capped it all off with his Super Bowl halftime performance this past February; bookmarking the end of his “After Hours” era. As incredible as it was for Abel to have such a successful marketing campaign, he’s an anomaly, because not every artist has the marketing budget to keep an album alive for so long. The Weeknd is in a handful of artists who are talented enough and have the label support to break Billboard Hot 100 records with ease. The average artist has a few weeks, maybe a couple months to promote in innovative ways.
The feasible way most artists are bringing attention back to their releases is the same practice that is actively hurting the average album life expectancy…
Deluxe Editions.
What was once a way for labels to maximize profits by releasing songs that didn’t make the cut for an album, has become the bread and butter for artists in the pandemic-streaming era. Artists now release an album, go back to the studio, make more music, and in a couple of months, release those new songs by tying them to their previous album as a “deluxe”. Especially in 2020, when a pandemic halted all concerts and tours indefinitely, every major artist was releasing a deluxe edition of their albums to recoup that lost tour money. These artists included Lil Baby, Moneybagg Yo, Kiana Lede, Curren$y, Busta Rhymes, Conway, Trippie Redd, Queen Naija, Rod Wave, and even The Weeknd did it with a few extra tracks.
With each of these deluxe editions comes 5-10 more songs to be added to an already likely 15-20 track album. As a fan, that amount of volume can become overwhelming; especially when these deluxe songs aren’t ever as good as the original project. Sure, these artists flood the market with volume for streaming revenue purposes. But after a while, these deluxe releases become just as forgettable as the original projects are, bringing us right back to square one.
In tandem with the issue of albums having too many songs to listen to, we also have the dilemma of so many artists releasing music. A key instance of this was the day of June 25th, 2021, in which we received new albums from Tyler The Creator, Doja Cat, Juicy J, Justine Skye, Evidence, Trae The Truth, Logic, and Ski Mask The Slump God just to name a few. Despite getting so much quality new music from these various artists, how was the conversation not supposed to move on from them when two weeks later, new albums from Vince Staples, Snoh Aalegra, Mariah The Scientist, Styles P, and IDK all released on the same day. It’s only natural for plenty of these projects to never be heard about again, despite these artists likely spending years of time creating these bodies of work.
This microwave media culture we live in has left us music fans spoiled with a higher volume of output than any other time in music history. Songs and albums come out and we move on to the next hot thing with ease. It doesn’t help that we’re coming out of a worldwide shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. So many artists have been waiting to release their new bodies of work, making 2021 one of the most hectic years to keep track of new albums.
The unfortunate side of this is that I’m unsure what could remedy the situation we’re in as consumers. It’s not like artists will start putting less songs on their albums, because that’s just how the streaming market operates now. Unless another COVID variant shuts things down again, album releases won’t be getting any fewer on a weekly basis. Deluxe albums may begin to slow down now that things like concerts and touring have returned, but there’s still plenty of incentive for artists to continue the practice.
Some people have begun advocating for Billboard to change their practices so that new albums can be released on Tuesday’s again. For more than 25 years, Tuesday’s were the standard album release day in the United States, until 2015 came and it was shifted to Friday’s as the global standard. While the synchronization was convenient for the music industry to combat pirating releases around the globe, the shift to Friday’s may have contributed to the shortened album life expectancy. When an album comes out on Tuesday, it has a whole week to live and stay the focus, whereas a Friday release may be more limited to the weekend. While it’s doubtful that a change back to Tuesdays would ever happen any time soon, still, a man could dream.
But maybe the real perpetrators are us as music fans. Maybe we’re not just spoiled by the artists, but our attention spans and commitments to individual albums have simply run thin. The music blogs and their news cycles hold a certain level of responsibility, just as the streaming platforms do in pushing the “next hottest thing” without ever revisiting previous works.
The true test will be how how this new Drake album stands the test of time. After an incredible rollout of polarizing album art and billboards in every city, how many weeks will it be until Certified Lover Boy becomes a thing of the past? And how about for the incoming mega stars like Kendrick Lamar, Rihanna, and Beyoncé?
