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Originally Posted by noisereductions
I gotta tell you, I really don't understand this trend...
Rihanna's new album dropped today. None of the 3 singles she released leading up to it are on the album. This seems like the new norm. It makes no (business) sense to me. Maybe that is because when we all grew up singles were promotional devices... to sell your album. A music video was a commercial - for your album. So your singles were on your album. That made sense, right?
But more and more it seems to just not be normal anymore. Go back to 2008/2009. Weezy put out "Hot Revolver" which was a single for Rebirth. It had the rock/rap sound. It would have fit on the album both thematically and minutes-wise. Baffling it was left off the final album. Yet was included on IANAHB2 years later. Why?
What about Drake's YOLO song? Same deal.
Maybe the worst offender was The Game's Red Album. What did he put out? 5 or 6 singles for that thing that didn't end up on the album? (Although the history of that album is a crazy mess... I mean he ended up dropping like 5 mixtapes of outtakes material just from those sessions...)
But anyway, my point is just I don't get this new way of doing things. Artist puts out a song. You like it. The album comes out and that song isn't on it. How does that help record sales?
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Whoah, you mean "Bitch better have my money" and "four fice seconds" -- two songs that were very explicitly stated to be on the upcoming Rhianna album -- aren't fucking on it?
I think part of this trend was actually started by (who else) our dear Mr. West. Kanye has always known how to "pilot test" an album and he's released singles that didn't end up on the resulting album many times in his career.
It's actually a great way to measure public opinion of material before dropping the actual album. I think that he chose to include the GOOD Fridays tracks that received the best feedback from fans on MBDTF. I actually believe that he did have an album finished in November of 2014, like he said he did, and I believe it contained a lot of the singles we heard in 2015. I think "So Help Me God" was a totally different album than Waves. It's like he focus grouped the songs and decided to scrap that attempt when they were met with kind of a like warm reaction.
Also, non-album singles have played a pretty big part in the history of pop music. The Beatles did this all the time. So did the Stones, but the Beatles turned it into sort of a pastime that's still practiced in Britain, thanks to a history of bands like T. Rex, Stone Roses and Blur using the single as a separate but still very important marketing vehicle from the album.
I think modern day hip-hop is actually following a lot of the trends of classic zeitgeist capturing British pop. You notice how much material some of these artists put out? How infrequently they go more than 1 year without releasing an album? How often they drop one a year, sometimes more, with countless mixtapes to boot?
Frankly, I don't really mind. Unless it's just plain shit music. Or great albums pop up once in a while amid a flurry of super missable, basic, boring songs and mixtapes. Look at Young Thug and and Future. I know that a lot of the material these guys drop is mixtape-level, but shit, they come out with *so much shit* it boggles the mind.
Plus, look at Drake. The man's having quite a bit of success with singles and collabs. Put out at a breakneck pace, I should add.
To me, it's not super annoying unless it's an artist I really love. So yeah, when Kanye released a bunch of single tracks... that irritated me. Not because the tracks aren't on the album, but because I don't really care about individual songs, especially when I've been waiting for an album for two years.
It's like.... imagine you're about to orgasm and woohoo!! but then all that happens is you sneeze. 😑
Yeah, sneezing is nice, right? Kind of a pleasant release. But... you know... in that context, it's just not what you're looking for at all. That's what the endless stream of singles and tracks (especially duds like FACTS) were like for me. You can only listen to one song so many times without sarting to hate it. So yes new individual tracks were nice, but I was all clogged up and needed something else entirely.
Gross imagery, I know. But apt.