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The reason is because the temptation to release material after you got a couple tunes together is really high...
especially when you're a solo electronic artist and you don't have to book studio time / coordinate schedules / raise cash / etc.
i for one am mostly indifferent to the length of an album - what's more important to me is whether or not the songs are good and/or are grouped in a meaningful way. if the artist's release has some kind of unifying theme/concept to it, then good on him/her, i don't care how long or short it is.
i feel that "album length" is more or less an artifact of older times when the preparation of an album was more costly and not as easy to iterate upon.
also, it's one thing when an artist wants you to devote a solid chunk of time to listening to a whole album - but multiply that by a whole assload of artists and it gets kind of scary. for instance, this last week or two i was actually kind of overwhelmed by the sheer number of "new year" releases, and getting through all of them actually felt like a bit of a chore. and these albums were all GOOD ones!! imagine if just 2 or 3 of those albums ended up being stinkers.
i think because it's free and not normally distributed on pieces of plastic that have a fixed manufacturing/environmental/logistical cost regardless of how much music is on them (maybe this is
That's a good point. I always feel cheated when I buy a $16 CD and only 2/3 of the disc has been used. Or even worse, half.
This brings to mind the demoscene and trying to cram as much content as possible on a floppy disk, or realizing "Hey, we've got 2 extra kbs on this disk! Let's fill them with sweet sweet music!"
getting through all of them actually felt like a bit of a chore. and these albums were all GOOD ones!!
YES! in general, especially if you're going down the list of new release posts on cm.o and there's a whole bunch of them at the same time. It feels like an obligation rather than an adventure of discovery.
Electronic music in general gravitates towards the EP model. I think it has to do with the market receiving it most of the time. It is also difficult to be prolific with longer releases.
You are correct with your first statement but I don't think it's for that reason.
Electronic music gravitates towards EPs because traditionally, electronic music (being pressed on vinyl) has a lot more bass than traditional recorded music like rock or jazz, and when music is recorded as physical grooves on wax, the more bass there is, the wider groove needs to be. If you don't make the groove wide enough, the bass will literally shake the needle and make it jump off the record, making it unplayable. Therefore, with very bass-heavy music (thumping drums, fat synth bass lines, etc), you can really only fit about 2 songs per side, and keep in mind that DJs want big lead-ins and -outs, so your songs average over 5 minutes long, and in some cases you have a 9 minute techno banger that takes up a whole side of a 12" record.
So even as electronic music transitioned into the world of CDs, vinyl still dominated the world of DJing, and even though electronic musicians might release an album of all their own material on CD, they were still releasing vinyl EPs ahead of the album (to cater to the DJ market and get DJs playing their stuff in clubs before the album would drop) or vinyl singles of the most popular songs with accompanying remixes (so DJs can play the hits). And even now as the world has mostly gone digital, there are still a lot of die-hard vinyl DJs out there, so you still have electronic artists releasing vinyl EPs and singles to cater to that crowd, aside from the obvious nostalgia of releasing digital EPs because that's the way it's always been done.
Obviously this all seems silly now in the world of digital music, and to your point, you are correct that EPs and singles are used as a promotional tool to drive albums. Just figured I should share how the EP got to dominating the world of electronic music even though the LP was king of rock & jazz.
It certainly would be nice if people took a more active role in curating their own material though. I'm guilty to breaking this though too, I started releasing tracks pretty early when perhaps I should have waited. I liked the three-tiered scene we had in the days of 8bc (and hope we can get there with uC) where basically there was 8bc where new people could get instant feedback on unfinished/unpolished material and learn to get better (with the incentive of gaining a few likes or comments to drive them to keep writing even if they're still beginners). Then there was another tier where people would compile tracks and release on netlabels as thought out, polished albums. This is where people would go once they got a little more serious about it (and it was a place to get more polished releases). Then there was also the physical scene where people would play shows and gain a following that way.
I liked the way that all worked, all valid niches.
danimal cannon wrote:The reason is because the temptation to release material after you got a couple tunes together is really high...
especially when you're a solo electronic artist and you don't have to book studio time / coordinate schedules / raise cash / etc.
well let's also keep in mind that traditionally record labels exist to sell full length albums (because that's where the money's at), so any recording contract would require a musician or band to release a certain number of full length albums over a certain number of years. So it was an obligation and not at all about actually putting out good music. Even selling singles is a relatively recent concept that didn't make sense before digital music. Still, every album was sold on the back of a few popular songs... you went and bought the CD just to have that one song you heard on the radio, and you were probably disappointed with half the other songs on there.
and I know Dan that you appreciate music and you like to listen to a lot of good music, but let's face it, most people just like a few songs they hear on the radio. They listen to Call Me Maybe 10 times a day because that's their new jam, and who cares if an artist has 3 albums and 2 EPs, they are just going to buy the one song that's popular and put it on their iPods and they are done.
Even selling singles is a relatively recent concept that didn't make sense before digital music.
wait, what?
music was sold as singles before albums (78 RPM vinyl fits about 3 minutes per side), LPs weren't invented until 1948
In the 50s and 60s, singles were the thing and LPs were uncommon- they didn't become a "you should listen to the whole thing" format in rock and jazz until the late 60s. You are somewhat correct in saying the 12" dance single is a younger concept, but that dates back to disco (70s.)
Decktonic wrote:Even selling singles is a relatively recent concept that didn't make sense before digital music.
wait, what?
music was sold as singles before albums (78 RPM vinyl fits about 3 minutes per side), LPs weren't invented until 1948
ok fine true. I started out writing something along those lines and then went back and changed it, and ended up making this gaffe.
what I mean was that the album as a format for recorded music was not where recorded music started, but then it was the king of profits, and singles came back to form when digital music made it easy for people to just buy the one song they really wanted instead of having to buy the whole album.
you get my point =_=
i for one am mostly indifferent to the length of an album - what's more important to me is whether or not the songs are good and/or are grouped in a meaningful way.
yeah this is how i think
i make a lot of short/fast songs so i feel like it makes sense for my releases to also be short
for me, 10 songs is still only 20 odd minutes anyway :v
I guess I'll have to sum up my point by saying that a well tailored and cared for short EP holds just as much ground as a well tailored and cared for full-length. Not all who release short albums are doing so for lack of passion.
Really interesting thread, nice to hear how people think about and consumes (like in listening) music.
When I listen to stuff for the first time I really want to be able to concentrate, but yeah, spending 1½ hour a day on the train to and from work is a great opportunity. That's because I don't want to miss anything and that I feel that the person(s) who made the music deserves that I pay attention to their efforts at least once.
I think the length of a digital release is irrelevant, at least for me.
Take the Peer - Dances EP for example, which I really enjoy and always seem to come back to; 22 minutes but has such substance that it really FEELS like a whole album. Physical on the other hand is another story, but the vinyl format is genius in that respect that you can have 7", 10" or 12".
A great format that's still a force to be reckoned with : )
I've never been into short releases because they don't feel substantial enough. I'm kind of a maximalist music listener and I want to get lost in albums because they're too long. I LIKE the challenge of having to set aside time to listen to a new full-length, and a lot of it is because albums that are longer are usually more interesting sonically to me. There's something really special about hearing an artist/band's sound develop over the course of an hour or so and coming to the end of it. A lot of my most memorable musical experiences have involved me at 2 in the morning having just finished listening to an entire album with nothing to distract me.
Which sucks, because my current favorite thing to listen to at the moment is dance music, and apparently no one in dance music believes in the album format anymore (mixes are the new albums -- I have too much to say about this so I'll just leave it at that).
That's also why I like to release full-lengths that are at least 10 songs in length. I want to make music for the kind of person that would stay up too late listening to music in a half-asleep haze because they think it's fun to listen to an hour of something uninterrupted and feel good afterward. I really like hearing long, progressive tracks that do the same thing over and over until you've just about internalized the sound, at which point the track will introduce something new.
I do feel like there's a lack of big, sprawling releases that manage to stay interesting over the course of the whole album, but that's just because it's really HARD to do that kind of thing. I don't feel like I've come even remotely close to doing that yet, but I like throwing big releases out there because it's what I grew up with.
honestly if the musics good, i dont give a shit either way.but id rather a shorter album than an album with a bunch of filler tracks to make it 'a proper full length record'. example - Holy other - With U. 5 songs. Each one a journey in itself. Amazing from start to finish. Holy Other- Held - decent album dont get me wrong but atleast 3 or so of those songs go nowhere, seem a bit void of ideas to me, and imo i wouldve taken as much joy if not more if it was a 5 or 6 track ep.
in ze real world Swans "The Seer" is up there in every best-of 2012 list on the planet and is two hours long :3