Music

Bloated albums may be streaming music's fault

by Richard Howard

When Drake released Views at the end of April, even those who dug the record complained that it was just too damn long. 82 minutes? There are feature films shorter than that. Obviously, Views isn’t the first album charged with being excessive, and there will always be longer albums just like there are going to be ones that clock in at under thirty minutes. But there certainly does seem to be a trend of unnecessarily long albums coming to the fore of late.

A$AP Rocky’s At.Long.Last.A$AP clocks in at nearly 70 minutes, while Kanye West’s The Life Of Pablo (which, as we later found out, wasn’t even complete) initially consisted of 19 tracks and lasted a solid hour. It’s not just hip-hop either – a listen through of James Blake’s The Colour In Everything takes 76 minutes of your time. It’s one thing if you’re writing The Wall, but many of these albums have been critiqued as “obnoxious,” “unfocused” and “unreasonably long,” and some in the industry are hypothesizing that this trend might have less to do with artistic overload and more with the way albums are rated these days.

A recent Fact Magazine article points out that at the end of 2014, Billboard changed its charting rules to give more weight to streaming and the digital sale of individual songs. Each song, whichever way it’s consumed, now counts towards the chart position of an album. As a result, adding songs to a high profile album that is likely to be played all the way through means more total plays and an increased chance of heading to the top of the charts. Now, I’ll totally give you that in Kanye’s situation, his complete inability to edit himself is probably at fault here. But in other cases, there’s other things going on that suggest a more calculated approach to album structure.

F’rinstance, did you know that even if a song was released eons ago as a standalone single, when it’s included on a later album all of its plays and sales still count? Exhibit A: “Hotline Bling,” released in July of 2015 with accompanying meme-creator’s dream video, surfaces on Views nearly a year later. With 400 million streams on Spotify alone equaling 267,000 album sales, it’s not hard to see how fortuitous the song’s inclusion on the LP is with respect to chart position. Now, it’s totally possible that all these artists mentioned simply are suffering from reaching that level of success when nobody wants to be the one to say: “Bruh…this album is stupid long. And tracks 4, 7, and 22 suck.” But don’t be surprised if soon, the 20 track album becomes the norm rather than the exception.