Albums have been a staple in music for almost a century. A concise body of work, with individual songs making up the entirety of the album. Earlier on, and still true today, artists wanted to demonstrate one idea, or one message, demonstrated throughout an entire album. By using visuals, aesthetics, lyrics, and even titles, artists would demonstrate their artistic ideas concisely, and purposefully. Nowadays however, artists would rather demonstrate how much money an album can make, rather than demonstrating their most powerful artistic statement. The invention of deluxe albums has thrown artistic merit in the ground, for modern artists. Streaming services reward artists based on streams, instead of how it was decades ago with physical sales dominating. With physical sales dominating sales, artists would try their best to make concise and purposeful albums, that don’t overstay their runtime, nor show an obvious money-grabbing scheme. In the Spotify and Apple Music age, artists have overfilled albums with throwaway and low-effort songs just for the purpose of bagging a few extra dollars of streams. It takes away from the artform massively, as these artists almost ruin their artistic statements with obvious money-grabbing. The situation has gotten even worse with deluxe albums, where artists will release almost an entire new album of throwaways just to make their wallet grow. Artists today will also use controversy for the sole purpose of marketing their music, instead of releasing genuine artistic statements and ideas. Recently, artists have even released singles with 5-10 different “mixes”, while promoting each one of them just for a little bit more cash. It’s truly saddening to see how my favorite artform has gotten reduced in recent years to simply money-grabbing. However, many of my favorite artists in the underground aren’t at a point in popularity where they would feel the need to release money-grabbing art, as they focus on their message, their statements, and their artwork rather than how many streams their latest song can get, or how high their song will end up on the Billboard Hot 100.
