Forgot about them, yes they did. Wikipedia says 263 official bootlegs, and they were all released as individual shows as far as I know. Certainly the first ones were. Not all of them were released as CDs to record shops though, they were available as made-on-demand or digital download. The Grateful Dead ones, as far as I know, are almost all mass-produced albums.
They had the most albums in the charts at one time, though, for certain.
The Dave Matthews Band has also release a metric shit ton of albums as well:
I’m a pretty big fan, I like the fact that you could see them live 2 nights in a row, they could play the same set list and you’d witness two different concerts.
MtM
According to Discogs, Japanese noise artist Merzbow has made 254 full-length albums, and 348 appearances all in all. Not bad.
From the archives of SCTV—Gordon Lightfoot Sings Every Song Ever Written.
About 30 years ago my sister was dating a guy who worked for Frank Zappa. I asked him to ask Zappa exactly how many albums he had out. Zappa replied “I don’t know.”
The last album Zappa released during his lifetime was The Yellow Shark, which according to the current official numbering is #62. Counting all the posthumous albums he is now up to #99. #100 is planned to be Dance Me This, an album of Synclavier music assembled by Zappa just before he died.
LOL. I bet that’s a great list! I’m not a huge fan of Costello, but I really respect his taste and range. (I might be a huge fan if I took the time to listen to more of his work.)
I’d like to see a list that ranks artists by the following metric:
Summation over all original-material albums of the square root of the number sold/distributed.
This would reduce the ranking for artists that pumped out lots of albums that weren’t very popular. It’s a different question than the OP’s, but I’d find it interesting. The square root makes it so that super popular albums (like Dark Side of the Moon or Tapestry) don’t push the gauge too much, nor do albums that few people ever heard.
Another interesting list would be by song or work, total distribution counts, including covers. That’d put Mozart and Bach on the lists, I bet!