This relentless forward momentum unites the vast array of musical styles Buddy deploys throughout. Superghetto, the new, 32-minute album by the Compton-bred rapper Buddy, is an exception to this rule, a record that uses its brevity to keep the listener on their heels, that successfully manages to feel as if it’s constantly molting and evolving until it cuts off. Kanye West’s series of seven-song albums from the summer of 2018 is perhaps the only high-profile use of the briefer format to be clearly staked on its aesthetic value, though that argument was undercut by the rushed, sloppy manner in which West rolled out his own, headlining installment of that project. The thing uniting records from these two poles - the deliberately overstuffed and the conspicuously lean - is that they feel overwhelmingly like the product of the rules and realities that govern streamed music, rather than the natural shape these bodies of work demand. There are many reasons this is now a feasible approach, from the radical drop in lead time and overhead required to issue music to a mass audience to the disappearance of the blowback artists once received for charging full retail price for less product. Stars routinely release music in 20- to 35-minute batches, describing many records that used to be EPs as proper albums. The trend was cemented in 2016, with Drake’s 20-song, 80-minute Views two years later, it had reached the realm of the absurd, with acts like the Migos funneling their Spotify listeners toward 72-song playlists that looped their new, already 24-song album three times in a row.īut more recently, those same streaming platforms have been flooded with rap albums, including those by many major artists, that are as short as any LPs in the genre since the late 1980s. But there have been creative knock-ons that have reshaped many of the rap albums released in this era.Īt first, the approach most artists took to Billboard’s rules about how streams would count for charting purposes was to release extra-long albums stuffed with as many tracks as possible, a full listen of an 18-track LP being more valuable than a listen of one with 12. This has had a variety of effects on rappers who look to navigate that major label system and those who choose to work outside it, most of them economic. After a decade of panic about declining CD sales, revenue from DSPs like Spotify and Apple Music made those companies wildly profitable once again, all while having normalized smaller recording budgets and more restrictive contracts. The successful monetization of music streaming has served primarily to keep major labels at the top of a food chain they created.
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