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24kGoldn, Tate McRae, and MUNA break down their pre-show rituals and favorite songs to perform live

In June, the pop artist Charli XCX released her sixth studio album, "Brat." A few days later, she released a second version, with three more songs, and cheekily called it "Brat and it's the same but there's three more songs so it's not." Some speculated this was a dig at Taylor Swift, whose album rereleases have drawn criticism by some who see them as a push to stay atop the charts. Really it was a nod to the same game many big artists are playing today: rolling out a tidal wave of iterations of albums and songs as they seek to grab attention and please the algorithmic gods on crowded apps like Spotify and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-tiktok-is-changing-music-industry">TikTok</a>."Everybody's playing a streaming game," said Nima Nasseri, a former A&amp;R lead at Universal Music Group who manages the music producer and artist Hit-Boy.In the streaming era, more is more, and the biggest stars in pop are fully embracing the never-ending album-release cycle — as well as nearly never-ending albums. Country artist Morgan Wallen's 2023 album "One Thing at a Time" clocked in at 36 tracks. In March, Beyoncé released 27 songs for "Cowboy Carter." In April, <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/taylor-swift-albums-ranked-weeks-no-1-billboard-200-chart-2024-7">Swift</a> gave her fans two hours to comb through her 16-track album, "The Tortured Poets Department," before unloading an additional 15 songs in an anthology edition just a few hours later. The music executive Nathan Hubbard, who podcasts for The Ringer and was trying to review Swift's first version when he got hit with the second, described the onslaught as a "hostage situation."Swift has since released more than 30 different iterations of "<a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/taylor-swift-too-many-songs-tortured-poets-department-opinion-2024-4">Tortured Poets</a>" in the form of remixes, vinyl editions, cassettes, and first-draft phone memos. In May, Billie Eilish released nine vinyl editions, four CDs, and a slew of sped-up and slowed-down versions of songs from her album "Hit Me Hard and Soft.""It's a very momentum-driven market," said Ben Klein, the cofounder at the record label and music-marketing firm Hundred Days. And when an artist has momentum, he said, "you want to really capitalize on that by putting out as much product as possible."Long albums can feel like a sprawling mess, particularly as most TikTok-era listeners rarely take time to play even full songs, never mind 31-track sagas. But while they grate on casual listeners, and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/arts/music/taylor-swift-album-tortured-poets-department-review.html">critics</a>, they can also delight superfans who take pleasure in conducting forensic analysis on lyrics while buying limited-edition vinyls to hang on their walls. "If you have the power to do so, small changes to the format or capsuled editions allow for artists to continue to satisfy their rabid fan bases," said David O'Connor, the vice president of artist and business development at Live Nation Entertainment. For megastars, the real money is in catering to their base.What these trends ultimately reveal is how a handful of tech platforms like <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/spotify-streaming-music-brutal-business-2024-1">Spotify</a> and TikTok continue to dramatically shape how music is made and consumed today. No artist, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/taylor-swift-tiktok-music-return-shows-biggest-stars-need-app-2024-4?">no matter how big</a>, can ignore the algorithm.Gen Z was too young to remember this, but not long ago, if you wanted to hear a song and it wasn't on the radio, the only way was to go to a store and buy a full album.For decades, the record industry's stranglehold on music distribution kept record sales growing at a healthy clip, peaking in the US at about $15 billion in 1999 (some $27 billion in today's dollars). But Napster arrived that same year, bringing illegal music downloads into the mainstream. In 2003, Apple's iTunes music store began selling individual songs for about a dollar, returning some revenue back to rights holders but further diminishing the album's position as music gatekeeper."Steve Jobs radically remapped the music industry," said Robert Fink, a professor of musicology and the music-industry program chair at UCLA's Herb Alpert School of Music. "He arguably saved the record business by creating a store where people would actually pay $0.99 for a song as opposed to zero. That was great. But what he also did is he re-created the singles format. You could just buy the one song." The album took another blow with the arrival of playlists on subscription streaming services like Spotify. And now, in the attention-span-depleted TikTok era of music discovery, the most meme-able 15 seconds of a song have started to matter more than the full track, much less a full album. Some artists even admit to <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-music-marketing-artists-labels-viral-videos-2022-6">thinking about TikTokable moments</a> during the songwriting process. As it has with politics and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-gets-news-from-tiktok-influencers-media-industry-2023-12">news</a>, the sound-bite-ification of social media has come for music."Most of my fans aren't really looking for an album," said Charlie Green, an artist and YouTuber who performs under the stage name CG5. "In the music industry today it's very important to just see how your singles do, and if they do well, then you release an album.""It's a little bit of the Wild West when it comes to why we release tracks on certain artists and albums on the other," Taylor Lindsey, a senior vice president of A&amp;R at Sony Music Nashville, said. "So much of it is just about artist preference and also where they are in their careers. But in the same breath, because we are in a world where there are 100,000 tracks uploaded to digital streaming platforms per day, and because the attention span is like 2.5 seconds, there's this sense of, 'You need more.'"Still, for some artists, albums can be a useful tool for marketing, streaming economics, and nourishing their biggest fans. More tracks on an album can also help it have the best chance at breaking through."The more songs on an album, the more bites at the apple for editorial and user playlisting and the potential for higher first-week sales," said Brian Zisook, the head of artist and label services and executive vice president of global operations at the music-streaming platform Audiomack."There's just less cost-prohibitive reasons to not put more songs on a record," said Audrey Benoualid, a music lawyer at the firm Myman Greenspan who has worked with artists like Ariana Grande and Tate McRae. "If you're capturing all of your fans and the fans are streaming 10 songs or they're streaming 30 songs, it actually makes a big difference on charting and streaming revenue."Of course, writing lots of quality songs for an album is easier said than done. And some artists are wary of letting social-media strategies or streaming incentives bleed into the creative process.Performers, whether indie artists or chart-topping pop stars, know digital virality can be fleeting and many listeners will hear their music only once. What matters more for their long-term careers is building an audience of superfans. That's where albums can really shine."Our core fan, as far as people that are buying meet-and-greet tickets to Judah &amp; the Lion shows, I do think that they love records," said Judah Akers, a singer and guitarist in the folk band Judah &amp; the Lion, which released a 19-track album called "The Process" in May.Superfans are the listeners most likely to buy <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/jennifer-lopez-cancels-tour-slow-ticket-sales-concerts-prices-ticketmaster-2024-6">concert tickets</a>, drive repeat Apple Music streams, and shell out money for physical records that they can listen to or frame as a wall hanging. The resurgence of vinyl sales as a fan collectible in recent years reflects that. US revenue from vinyl records, CDs, and other physical formats grew to $1.91 billion last year, a 10% increase from 2022, per data compiled by the RIAA. According to entertainment industry data firm Luminate, the top 10 best-selling albums of 2024 had an average of seven vinyl releases, 13 CDs, and two cassettes."The album as a form is simultaneously dying and living its best life," said Marie Clausen, a managing director at the record label Ninja Tune. "Now that music discovery is driven so much by TikTok and shorts and reels, it is really important to offer these real-life touch points or experiences basically where you can hold a record in your hand."Like their counterparts in pop, Akers' band plans to release an extended deluxe version of "The Process" with five additional songs later this year. He hopes fans will try to guess how those added tracks fit into the album's broader storyline, which tackles the artist's and his cowriter's experiences with grief."A 24-song record is like feeding someone a full-course meal and then giving them free desserts," Akers said. "It could be too much. But I think for us, since this record is so important to us, we want to keep pointing our fans back."With no physical bounds, an album today can really be whatever an artist wants it to be (even if the nebulous shape of it can make it a moving target for music critics)."What defines an album is entirely up to the artist," said Nathan Hubbard. "I think constraints can breed creativity, and historically they have. But I think that the removal of those constraints has given artists the ability to just create on their own terms and to define whatever an album is for them."<a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/author/dan-whateley">Dan Whateley</a> is a senior media reporter at Business Insider covering social media and the music business.

Why Taylor Swift keeps blasting fans with never-ending albums

<ul class="summary-list"><li>When fans called Beyoncé out for using an ableist term in her song "Heated," she changed the lyric.</li><li>I'm grateful for the swift action, but the continued pile-on frustrates me.</li></ul>When Beyoncé received criticism for using an ableist term in the song "Heated" from "Renaissance" — her first solo album in six years, which dropped at the end of July — she quickly changed the lyric. She used the word "spaz," and the critique came largely from disabled people: "Spaz" carries negative connotations for those in the disability community, specifically those of us with <a href="https://www.insider.com/wheelchair-user-cerebral-palsy-transformed-life-with-fitness-jay-moir-2020-6">cerebral palsy</a>, including myself. People have used the word to make fun of our spastic and uncontrollable movements. But people also often use it to imply going wild and throwing caution to the wind, including in African American Vernacular English. After receiving word of its offense, Beyoncé and her team quickly handled the situation. A rep for Beyoncé <a href="https://www.insider.com/beyonc-remove-ableist-lyric-heated-renaissance-2022-8">told Insider</a> in a statement, "The word, not used intentionally in a harmful way, will be replaced," and she removed it from the song. This change came on the heels of Lizzo's use of the word "spaz'' in her song "Grrrls," which she released in mid-June. Instead of arguing and getting defensive, the "Special" <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Cew0HrlPhEq/">singer apologized</a> and made the change. After seeing this swift change and apology, I was ecstatic. Truth be told, people often don't listen to those in the disabled community when we bring up concerns about, well, anything. So after two of the most well loved and talented artists in the world listened to the concerns of the disability community, you might think that I, an outspoken Beyoncé fan, disabled journalist, and author would be satisfied, right? Not quite. <h2>Gratitude followed by frustration — but not with Beyoncé</h2>While I'm happy that these two major artists <a href="https://www.insider.com/tiktok-disability-community-forgave-lizzo-ableist-slur-2022-6">changed the harmful lyric</a>, my frustration remains. My frustration lies not with the artists but with some members of the disability community and the double standard that Black people inside and out of it face in these situations. When the news of Beyoncé's and Lizzo's word usage and subsequent changes first dropped, the first thing I did was go where people go when they want to, at best, kill some time or, at worst, ruin their own day: Twitter. As I scrolled, I saw many non-Black disabled people react in one of a few ways: They voiced their gratitude about the changes, or they harped on the fact that both artists said the word in the first place, despite the artists having already rectified the situations. After seeing three tweets in a row on my timeline that were dragging out the situation, I tweeted about my frustration and annoyance at the way that some white and other non-Black members of the disability community seemed to jump at the chance to write long posts about how disappointed they were in Lizzo and Beyoncé. I truly believe that no one is above critique — including Lizzo and Beyoncé — but I question whether the white and non-Black disabled people in the community writing these extensive posts ever take the time to call out artists and others using ableist language who look like them. <h2>An impossible standard and the importance of nuance</h2>In the past few years there's been an increased call to stop using ableist language, including words like "crazy" or "psycho," which artists often use to refer to exes, as well as words like "lame" and "stupid" to describe things or people someone might dislike. This is progress. But when we talk about the importance of ridding our vocabularies and cultural touchstones of ableist language, my hope is that we don't forget to stop and think about the nuances in these conversations. Let's think about this particular situation; an instance centered around an ableist word, yes, but also one that those in Black communities sometimes use without any intent to harm anyone. I have always known the power of words; that's why I became a writer. Words can heal, and they can harm. Language — and the way we choose to use it — matters, and words have meaning. In fact, sometimes a single word can hold multiple meanings. Both the effect and meaning of words also shift and change with our culture, and this flexibility is one of the greatest gifts that language gives us. In the disability community, we often talk about the importance of distinguishing between impact and intent; sometimes, even good intentions cannot erase the harm done to others. The point of acknowledging nuance here is not to make excuses for people. But I do want to push back on the eager way in which some white and non-Black disabled people jump at the chance to scold Black people after a mistake without first considering the potential of their intent and the fact that we all have different experiences. To see some <a href="https://www.insider.com/people-with-disabilities-are-sharing-their-stories-with-abled-people-on-twitter-2019-3">members of the disability community</a> pile on Black people time and time again when they make mistakes while giving white and non-Black artists much more slack around using ableist language hurts. Take, for example, Tate McRae's song "Stupid," which includes the lyric "I'm stupid for you" in reference to a paramour who is "bad for her health." In the song "Me!," Taylor Swift apologizes for "going psycho" on the phone, and Brendon Urie mentions that there are "a lot of lame guys out there." The list goes on. While I enjoy these artists' music, society has not challenged most of them on these choices. Also, unlike these artists, both Beyoncé and Lizzo changed their lyrics. But the criticism they received exceeded the response to the work of countless non-Black artists I did not list here, many of whom continue to use ableist language. So the issue goes beyond the word "spaz" for me. While I'm glad both corrected their mistakes, my hope now is that those in the disability community who often hold Black people — and Black women, specifically — to a near-impossible standard can correct their mistakes, too.

I have cerebral palsy and am grateful Beyoncé and Lizzo changed their lyrics. I'm still frustrated we hold Black artists to higher standards.

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24kGoldn, Tate McRae, and MUNA break down their pre-show rituals and favorite songs to perform live

Callie Ahlgrim

Why Taylor Swift keeps blasting fans with never-ending albums

Dan Whateley

I have cerebral palsy and am grateful Beyoncé and Lizzo changed their lyrics. I'm still frustrated we hold Black artists to higher standards.

Keah Brown

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