who’s asking you to play it all in one day?

toss on a few songs at a time, and finish it at your own pace

just like you don’t have to finish an entire 50-minute episode of a TV show in one sitting

Yes, they have, but it is also much more common to do it nowadays when artists are directly incentivized to release as much music as possible for streams and playlisting

Go look at all of the biggest streaming weeks of all time, the vast majority of them are long ass albums

The majority of people that watch TV shows are watching a new episode in one sitting.

Same with a film.

Why are albums the one where we’re asking the audience to break up the experience?

It’s not like it’s a video game where it’s 15-20+ hours in length, most albums are between the length of one episode of TV or one film, and most people experience those in one sitting unless their lives are extremely busy

That's fair. But that 6/15 album that's 45 minutes is way more likely to get more listens from me than the 8/20 album that's an hour+

There's plenty of movies I like that are 3-4 hours and games I like that are 30+ hours, but a lot of movies or games that are that long just feel bloated for the sake of being bloated

I'm not saying you're wrong and I'm right, you can and should enjoy whatever you want and listen to music however you want, but the streaming era produced a lot of bloated albums for the sake of being bloated and they end up being cumbersome to listen to for me

yea and then you look at the detailed breakdown of streams by song and find out 95% of the streams are from 3 songs & the rest of the tracklist barely got any plays, so it wouldn’t even matter how many songs were on the album in the first place as long as those 3 stayed on it

if you can find the time to watch an hour long TV show in one sitting but not listen to an hour long album in one sitting, maybe you just don’t like the music

he phoned it in and i don't even want to think about the use of AI on here

don't care, MUSIC out now

all i’m saying is that if an artist willingly puts out a long album full of slop, their short albums are gonna be full of slop too

it’s an issue with the artist themself, not the length of the album

this entire “short albums >>> long albums” argument was already disproven years ago when Kanye followed up TLOP with ye

Niggas will listen to a 10 song 70 minute album where all the songs are way too long for no reason but s*** on a 18 song 70 minute album where every song is fire

You spittin

Yeah I definitely get the general critique , Im not even pro long album tbh but i just hate when people act like it cant be done at all

I’m not pro long album, I just dont like the generalization like long albums cant be done well or with intention

This is the playlisting mentality that has just warped your brain

Like I said, anyone making absolute statements about both are wrong, but it’s still much more common for longer albums nowadays to be the bloated and unfocused ones

Yeah I agree

I def am not tryna defend 20 song albums overall, I just think we shouldnt be completely closed off to it

Drake proved it right when he declared NWTS his best album bc it’s concise. U see how It’s easy to cherry pick examples?

Depends on your definition of a ''glorified playlist''. If you mean an album where an artist just threw in a bunch of random songs then yes, they are rarely classics. But it is possible to craft a very, very good album without a major theme in sound or story. Some artists can excel in multiple genres and the chance of a cohesive album is almost gone if they want to showcase that.

But I do agree that most classic albums are cohesive - but I think that's due to the limitations of most artists.

if it’s just a good collection of songs with no connecting theme in sound nor story, that’s just a mixtape or a playlist lol

NWTS isn’t his best though, that’s Take Care

Nah not yet. My whole point is these long albums dont have legs. Wait for 3rd and 4th week numbers

Fitting 30 songs in 1 hour 17 mins is impressive if anything

I love OP, one of my fav posters but yeah this thread aged like milk

bad artists release bad albums, good artists release good albums

good artists don’t drop 20+ song albums if they don’t meet the artist’s own standards

bad artists might release bad 20+ song albums because they have no quality control

it’s a lot easier to f*** up a long album than a good one, but good long albums will always be better than good short albums