It takes time to grow as a person and cultivate new ideas. It may not be possible to do that if you don't get in and out of whatever it is you're doing.
Imagine telling Hemingway he has to release a new blog post every week instead of a book every couple of years.
"What's he going to record a song about?"
"Nothing."
"Spotify'll kill him."
"I guess they will."
"He must have got mixed up in something with the music industry."
"I guess so," said Nick.
"It's a hell of a thing."
"It's an awful thing," Nick said.
They did not say anything. George reached down for his mobile phone and wiped the screen.
"I wonder what he did?" Nick said.
"Failed to write enough songs fast enough to generate user engagement. That's what Spotify will kill them for."
"I'm going to cancel my Spotify subscription," Nick said.
"Yes," said George. "That's a good thing to do."
"I can't stand to think about him waiting in the recording room and knowing he's going to get it. It's too damned awful."
"Well," said George, "you better not think about it."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_%28literature%29
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Across_the_River_and_into_the_...
But do Pop artists generally spend years to publish an album?
I honestly don't know, I don't follow that world anymore.
Except some of his books came about because he didn’t keep to that schedule, and we don’t usually talk about Hemingway for his articles in the Toronto Star.
But anyway my point was more about producing significant and valuable work.
Many of these are.. not so good. A few are great.
I was just making a side comment. I thought it was funny and that your analogy was even more true because we don’t talk so much about Hemingway’s frequent articles in a newspaper but we study at length and hold in high regard his long form works.
He's not telling bands how to be successful artistically, he's telling them how to be successful financially in the modern music world.
If the band is only interested in promoting their art, they can do anything they want. If they want to earn a living too, they need to provide the market what it wants.
In his prime writing period he was closer to the former than the latter; between 1923 and 1933 he published, it looks like, at least 49 short stories, 10 poems, 3 novels, and two nonfiction books. At least one of the novels was initially released in serialized form over 6 months of magazine issues.
If your goal is the best art you can produce, then perhaps Spotify and that roller coaster isn't what you should care about.
If you want to good art while also also getting a lot of buzz so you can make money or be popular, then you need to deal with market forces, just like everyone always has.
Different artists will value to varying degrees generating good art, exposing many people to that art, and getting paid well. All those goals are related, but I doubt any one of them can be maximized without concessions from others.
> Imagine telling Hemingway he has to release a new blog post every week instead of a book every couple of years.
Authors release at their own schedule if they don't rely on the money from the books, they have other income, or they've already made enough to be secure. Hemingway is not really different. Neither is any other already famous artist.
I guess in the past musicians toured and performed to satisfy that need, and relegated the "important" work to long term writing/composing. With Spotify (and specially now with COVID) it seems this has changed since the only way to generate income is by releasing music.
Does it really matter for artists that aren't being played multiple times a day on iHeartMedia/Clear Channel radio stations already if they follow this model? I doubt it, unless their goal is more about fame than art, in which case the question answers itself.
And how exactly will people get paid, when Spotify (and other streaming services) have effectively replaced album sales?
This is just the same tired old "exposure" argument.
Touring and merch sales, which is why the aggressive release schedule on Spotify to keep buzz up is supposed to be good in the first place.
> This is just the same tired old "exposure" argument.
The whole argument about needing to release more often is predicated by that exposure argument. If you don't think it works, then when you release on Spotify doesn't matter at all.
Either you accept that Spotify buzz drives attendance and thus more buzz from more releases more often brings more money, or you don't accept that and then there's no pressure to release more often.
You're dead wrong. I don't have the energy to go into it anymore, but see my other comments on the matter if you care.
Yes totally, but my point was not so much about the time spent doing the thing as the pauses in between.
Hemingway's fiction in particular aside, it is worth noting that many of the novel-length works now considered classics were actually created and released as a series of shorter works, often to fairly strict deadlines:
https://booksonthewall.com/blog/serial-novel-a-brief-history...
It's much easier when there are literally thousands of song writers trying to get a label or famous singer to use their song. The Nashville model is pretty much everywhere now.
It also helps that we've been able to computationally determine which parameters and heuristics are most likely to end up as a hit. There's a reason popular music across genres all more or less sounds the same today (loud, compressed with little dynamic range, auto-tuned, 4 chords, etc), with the difference between them being the style they are in.