coollino
Player Valuation: £80m
I would say so yes. A lot depends on their fan base I suppose. The majority of people now will stream music and probably never pay for physical copies or downloads. And they will just stream the songs they like or have heard, and won't even bother checking out other songs on the albums. So for many artists, so long as you have 3 or 4 bangers on the record that are going to be streamed tens/hundreds of millions of times, it doesn't matter what makes up the rest of the albums. Sequencing, concept and even song quality of the fillers are no longer factors for many artists. Maybe I'm being a bit unfair to the artists there and it's actually the labels that are instigating this, but I do think it's a real issue.
I thought 2024 was a cracking year for albums. My top 10 were all solid 9s and even a couple of 10s. But I struggled to compile a list the year before and this year to date not a single record would have made last years list, and only The Lathums and BCNR would have come anywhere near. But there's been some fantastic music released this year. There have been lots of lead singles that have had me excited for the albums but when they dropped I was disappointed because the quality wasn't there.
There are still plenty of artists for who artistic quality is aspired (but not always achieved) and TLDP is certainly one of them, especially in putting out new material. And it makes sense for them as their fan base is primarily made up of fan girls and boomers (6 music dads) who still prefer to buy their music rather than stream, and also spend their money on going to see them. You can see why big labels wanted to sign them and why they then spent so much time and money promoting them. I wonder how many different versions of vinyl there will be. I think there are already about 8 and the big players like Blood Records and Assai haven't announced yet and I'm sure there'll be a record store tour too. Some of these fan girlies will probably end up with about 5 or 6 copies of the record. It's a cash cow for the label.
Sorry. Hope it's not TLDR.
I agree with the first paragraph to an extent, but in a different way. No one cares about number one in the singles or album charts anymore, most streamed artists seems to be more important. Which is why Drake, Bieber, Travis Scott, SZA, Beyonce etc have 20+ songs on an album as it floods the market, there are some rules on this such as only 5 songs from a person's stream of that album count, or something, which is why some (Swift) do so many special editions. I think the 2828392 reissues of the same album is one of the worst things at the mo. But one thing about this way of them doing it, is I don't think a lot of artists have a few big songs now, they have like 10 evenly big ones. Out of the people above, I can't name their most streamed song, Inc Swift who is everywhere
I think I agree with your first point more in your second paragraph where it is fairly common for people to have the odd viral hit but the rest is pretty crap, bands like Sault and DJ/producers like Two Shell have cracked how to be good at both, but as I can only name those two who work streaming well but also have the talent to back it up (especially Sault who have like 10 albums in 5 years or something). I think there is good music every year though, although bandwise it might be a bit harder to find as I don't listen to that bands newer bands these days I guess, other than the odd one or two. A lot of the new showgaze bands seem to be guilty of one or two good songs, and the rest are pretty bland. Good for tiktok.tho
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