Now Spinning: The hyper production of music

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Noor Hannosh

Remember One Direction? Well even if you do I am going to remind you; they were a British boy band put together on the singing competition show “The X-Factor‰” that has since lost a member and gone on a hiatus. Now I am not here to tell you the history of One Direction but they are the perfect example of hyper production in the music industry. When they were still together they would release an album, go on a world tour, record their next album while on tour, and release it exactly a year later. So essentially they rushed album production to keep their fans happy, and they aren‰’t the only ones.

Drake put out “More Life‰” a year after the release of “Views‰Û, and while people may have not liked either, they disliked “More Life‰” more. The record has 22 songs, it seems like there was no quality control on the music like most artists do. The best records usually have only a handful of carefully selected songs on there after years of writing and recording.

Releasing a lot of music really fast is not always received negatively by fans. Think of Brockhampton; they released a three album trilogy in 2017, each having 17, 16, and 15 songs respectively. They released 48 songs across these three records, but fans ate it up because though it was a lot of music it was good music, there was some quality control involved. I am sure the boy band recorded way more music than they released and these were the best of the best. This is an outlier in a way, very rarely is such quickly produced and released music this good and accepted by fans and the public alike.

Now think of Frank Ocean, everyone loved “Chanel Orange‰” and everyone wanted him to release more music, but he didn‰’t. He waited and made us wait and then he released “Blonde‰Û four years later and that album was well thought out and produced because he took his time, and fans loved it because he took his time. Often when artists ignore the pressure to produce music quickly we actually get high quality music.

MGMT did a very similar thing, they waited five years between their self-titled record “MGMT‰” and their most recent release “Little Dark Age.‰” This five year time gap led to an album that was really well received by fans and newcomers alike.

Some artists like Car Seat Headrest want to make sure that the music that they put out is the best that it can be. This is why they reworked their 2011 album “Twin Fantasy.‰” The purpose of doing this was to make the original record feel more complete, instead of releasing new music they wanted to fix what they saw problems with in their 2011 record.

Spending more time on music does not necessarily mean that it will be better, there are plenty of albums that have flopped after a lot of time has gone into them. In the same token producing records very quickly does not mean that it will be a bad record; look at Brockhampton they are just a band that wants to get all of their good music out as quickly as possible. Again this argument really comes down to the talent of the artist and if they can maintain what they have done in the past.