Take a look at the discographies of acts like The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath or David Bowie, and you’ll see that they were studio workhorses, releasing at least one album a year, and often more. Nowadays, it’s not unusual for a big name band to go four or five years between albums. Was it really that different back then? If so, why?
Something I’ve wondered for a long time, too. KMFDM is one of the only bands I know that releases an album every…18 months or so. Used to be once a year.
I think it has to do with the relationship between the album and touring. I remember reading that back then bands made most of their money off of record sales and would go on short tours to drive sales. Now the album is promotional material for a tour, which is where they make the real money. This naturally leads to longer tours and less studio production.
Also remember that albums were, on average, quite a bit shorter back then.
In terms of productivity, though I’m not sure anyone comes close to CCR. 6 albums in 2 years.
It really was a different business back then. Bands made actual money of record sales and touring was how you promoted the record. The usual thing was to write while on the road, go into a studio and record and an album, and be back on the road before the album even came out. I am most familar with Rush, and the “Behind the Lighted Stage” film has a good section on this. Basically, they spent the first six or eight years of their career on the road. The money made from touring most not have been that good considering the ticket prices back then.
Now, bands make their money off the tour. Recording an album is done to give you an excuse to tour. Between ticket prices and merchandising at the show, bands can make hundreds of thousands per appearance and millions off of touring. With the internet fans are much more connected with the bands they follow, and the musicians can afford to take some time off. Plus, it lets the wallets of fans refill.
Before rock, artists wrote their own stuff less often and the unit of measure was a single. Getting in, recording some crafted singles, releasing them and compiling them with a few fillers into an album was just the way it was done.
With artists writing their own music, and the unit of sale AND of artistic creativity became the album, and with albums being more profitable than singles, the “release rhythm/pace” changed accordingly…
Guesses:
Less competition – there weren’t a dozen good bands in every town with access to pro recording equipment and an understanding of manufacturing hooks.
The dominance of Top 40 and the unification of the market – All the kids listened to the same music and a great song could sell an album.
So, as has been mentioned, albums made money. The level of mp3 “exchange” today is another factor in making albums less profitable.
The technical advances of studio recording were also a factor. Before about 1967, virtually all Lps were recorded on 4-track recording machines (something that is so primitive by modern standards, teenage kids practicing in their parents’ basement probably wouldn’t bother with it.) But if the technology was primitive, at least it was speedy to get a finished product. Many classic rock records were recorded in as little as one or two weeks! As multi-track (and eventually digital recording) technology became more sophisticated, acts began spending more & more time in the studio. When the Beatles spent six months-plus recording “Sargeant Pepper”, that was considered a very big deal. Nowadays, a major label release would likely take a minimum of six months work.
Also, bare in mind that there was no concept of “classic rock” as we know it today. Even into the 70s, rock/pop music was basically considered disposable, quickly forgotten merchandise. A band who was a mega-hit sensation one month could easily be considered old news just six months later. A band that hadn’t released a record in five years would have been ancient history. Therefore, there was an impetus for acts to continually release new material, to keep themselves in the public eye.
I’ve often marveled at the subject of this thread. Long-lived groups (like the Stones) do slow down as they get older, settle in with their families, and enjoy the fruits of their earlier labor, but this only explains part of it, because recent young artists don’t have the same rate of recorded output as young artists of the 60s and 70s.
Other posters have mentioned other factors, such as changes in recording technology, and, especially, the fact that money from performing is a bigger proportion of an artist’s income than it used to be.
I would add two more factors:
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The fans of a certain group expected new music from them more often, because people didn’t have as much easy access to such a breadth of music then (no internet, little interest in or knowledge of the many “world musics”, etc.), so a greater proportion of any one person’s music collection was dominated by a few musical acts.
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EVERYTHING happened more quickly then – at least from about 1965 to 1972. Politics, social customs in the West, all the arts… you name it, it changed pretty much from month to month. Creative musicians, including in rock, were primed and pumped to churn out creative music, which further fueled the zeitgeist, and on in a virtuous circle.
(Just to give one example: Linguist John McWhorter looks at one theme – public speaking styles – in his book Doing our Own Thing, and finds that the big change even in that occurred during this very period.)
The only post in this thread so far I disagree with is this one:
…because the classic rock era the OP is talking about certainly includes the years when most pop/rock bands (the Beatles, the Stones after 1965, etc.) were writing most of their own music.
One other factor: In reading detailed accounts of, especially, the Rolling Stones, I am struck by how much of the songwriting, and sometimes even the recording occurred during concert tours.
(Example: during the five-week 1969 US tour, the Stones wrote (and/or fleshed out) most of the material that would be released a year and a half later as Sticky Fingers; and, they recorded early versions of several of the tracks during a visit to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, the same days they were performing in Birmingham.)
Perhaps this isn’t done so much anymore – perhaps now it’s more common that the composing, the recording, and the touring occur separately.
(The way the Stones did it reminds me of scientists (social, biological…) who do summertime fieldwork, but teach during the academic year – in my experience, during the summer, in the excitement of being in the field, a scientist often gets “more done” in terms of collaborating with colleagues and generating ideas for articles, etc., than he/she does during the rest of the year, even though he/she is in the presence of colleagues then, too.)
I was under the impression that, back then, it was pretty much written into the standard recording contracts. You were to produce one album and X singles per year.
As far as I can figure, Pink Floyd was the first major band to jump off the album-a-year treadmill. In their first six years, they put out seven albums (eight if you count Relics). But the huge success and chart longevity of Dark Side of the Moon was a game-changer. It bought the band the time to try out an experiment that failed (the aborted Household Objects album) without losing their momentum, and to work at a leisurely pace in the studio to ensure that subsequent albums had the polish and sonic depth to match Dark Side. They didn’t need a quick follow-up, and for the rest of the '70s they settled into an every-other-year release schedule.
…and they were the ones who started stretching things out in the 70’s (those that were still around). No different than Peter Grant changing the game for bands when he demanded that Zep get 90% or something of the gate - things started to change in terms of what bands got from touring in the 60’s, but really took hold in the 70’s. Read Hit Men and **the Mansion on the Hill **for a couple of informative, eye-opening looks at how the business of music changed across the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s…
It can’t be stressed hard enough how ephemeral rock music was thought to be at the time.
There had already been a rock boom in the 50s and dozens of acts shot to the top of the charts. And almost every one of them was gone by the time The Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan.
Rock music was made by teenagers for teenagers. Singers were fads that were embraced and discarded as fast as the hula hoop. Any performer who had long-term plans started switching out of rock and into adult music, as Ray Charles and Bobby Darin did.
When The Beatles appeared, nobody thought their music would last – including The Beatles. They made self-deprecating comments about their lasting value and certainly the reporters – adults who knew nothing about rock and cared less – kept asking them what they were going to do in a couple of years when the fad would die out. When Pete Townshend wrote “hope I die before I get old” he did so in part because no one at the time believed that playing loud guitar could be an occupation for a 30-year-old. Adults agreed. They hated, hated, hated The Beatles in terms we can’t imagine today. William F. Buckley wrote in 1964:
On top of all that, the music world was thought of in terms of singles. Albums were put out to capitalize on the popularity of hit singles. They were filler, recorded not merely in a week or two, as said earlier, but often literally in a day. Singles had short shelf lives. They shot up the charts and shot down and then vanished. They had no afterlife. They were unavailable except for the later album version, which might sit in stores longer. There were no music videos, no oldies stations. Last month’s hit was buried under the avalanche of new product. That was partly because of the fad nature of the business, partly because songs were simpler, and the two-track recording machines allowed for little studio manipulation. If you didn’t have a hit single out, you were effectively invisible. Touring, even for major names, was usually a matter of gathering several groups as a package, with each playing its last couple of hits, three or four of five times a day, in small auditoriums.
It was that different back then. The Beatles really did change everything. It’s like Dorothy going from black & white into color.
Another early adopter of the slowed-down release schedule, although they had a brief spurt of relatively frenzied activity 
when they cranked out Presence only a year after Physical Graffiti, and then released their concert film and accompanying double live album the same year.
My guess is that before the 60s that bands could not count on getting never-have-to-work-again stinkin’ rich with a double platinum album. As power shifted away from the labels to the acts the talent realized it didn’t have to work so hard.
Think of how Chess records and Zaentz made all the money off of their acts and the artists did well, but did not become really rich. Then compare that to how The Beatles started their own label and how that paradigm then became copied on both sides of the pond.
There’s occasional bands who still release an album a year, or nearly so - since 1998 the Drive-By Truckers have released 9 studio albums, 2 live albums, one DVD, and a collection of unreleased songs. The quality has been uniformly high as well. It probably helps that for most of their career they’ve had 3 strong singer/songwriters in the band.
This last point may be important, as it seems to me that there are less bands around nowadays with several singer/songwriters. Every member of the Beatles wrote and sang, 4 of the original 5 Byrds did, and the Stones had two great songwriters, as well as some well chosen covers.
Ringo wrote very little, and at the beginning George wasn’t writing that much either. But as the band developed they did have three excellent writers, and that certainly increased their output.
Try keeping up with Acid Mothers Temple. The discography on Wiki is incomplete; I doubt even the band knows exactly how many albums they’ve cranked out in the last 15 years.
As I recall, it was Pink Floyd who really changed the pattern (or, at least, they brought it home to people that the pattern had changed). Up to and including Dark Side of the Moon (released in early ‘73) they produced an album more or less once per year, just like virtually every other successful act did. *Dark Side *was a huge hit, of course, and people were eagerly awaiting their next album, but it was about another two and a half years before Wish You Were Here finally appeared. I can remember people complaining and grumbling about the long hiatus. (As I understand it, it wasn’t intentional. Rather, they wasted a lot of time on recording very experimental stuff that they ultimately decided did not work, so they scrapped it all and started again.) The point is that they got away with it. Wish You Were Here may not have been as big a hit as Dark Side, but it still sold well enough, and the Floyd remained stars. They, and other acts (and their record companies), realized it was no longer necessary to put out product quite so often, so long as the product was of sufficient quality (which, of course, takes longer to produce anyway).
Two very good points that I’d say are somewhat related.
Popular music of all genres lived and died on the Top 40, which was available on AM radio. FM radio worked just fine, but did not have the popularity of AM, likely due to it catering to such niche demographics as classical music lovers, or fans of experimental music. It was the Top 40 AM stations that had the biggest ratings–even as recently as the late 1970s, a TV show such as WKRP in Cincinnati could be made about a Top 40 AM station; and in WKRP’s case, its struggle for ratings. Top 40 was where contemporary popular music was–nowhere else.
And the Top 40 catered to everybody: at any given time, you could hear all kinds of genres on it: looking at the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 from July, 1969, I see artists as diverse as Henry Mancini; Blood, Sweat, and Tears; CCR; and Tommy James sharing the charts. So if you were, say, Three Dog Night, and you didn’t want to be shunted aside in favour of Zager and Evans (or buried under new product, to borrow Exapno’s phrase), you made sure you put out something that made that chart: a hit single if you were lucky, but something at the very least.
To try to tie all this together, I’d guess that it was the lack of sources for music (thanks, JKellyMap), and the amount of music vying for what space was available, which was constantly turning over (thanks, Exapno); that helped ensure that artists were constantly writing and recording.