In the 60’s and 70’s, it seems like the popular bands were making a new album almost every year.
Now, most big rock bands take 3-5 years between albums. What has changed?
A variety of reasons, from longer tour cycles, to social media making it easier to stay engaged with fans and culturally relevant. You don’t need a steady stream of singles to stay in the public eye anymore.
The economics changed. Touring used to be to support album sales and was mostly domestic, but now big artists have to service a global audience, and it’s tours where they earn their money, not album sales. So instead of an 8-month 20 show domestic tour, they do 2-3 year global tours with a hundred+ stops.
This, exactly. Most artists don’t make much money from their new albums/singles now, largely because most of their listeners aren’t buying physical copies of their albums, but instead are listening on streaming services. They make most of their income now through touring.
I’ve heard pretty much the same thing that @DCnDC notes: in the past, musicians toured in support of their albums. Now, musicians release new music (i.e., albums, songs) in support of their touring.
Also, in the days of old, musicians’ contracts with their record labels typically specified a certain number of albums to be recorded and released, and may have even mandated a time period in which those would be completed.
The answer is in the obverse. Why were artists compelled to churn out so many more records in the past? The answer is limited shelf space and radio time. If it wasn’t new; it didn’t get either and thus did not sell (unless repackaged as “Greatest Hits”). Record stores and radio-driven hits are a thing of the past. Albums may be, too, for that matter.
No band, group. or artist even makes a full album of songs any longer. If they have a song that they think may sell, the song is ‘dropped’, used to be called released. Coming up with 12 other songs to fill what used to be called an “album” in the old days is seldom done.
It is a hold over from the days of vinyl records, that held through the CD era and is just a relic of the past.
As a universal, blanket statement, this is simply not true.
Artists may release individual songs well ahead of the release of an album, or only release albums once they have enough songs collected (and previously released) to fill up the ~30-60 minutes to constitute an “album,” but it’s untrue that “no one even makes albums anymore.”
In Olden Days, bands released albums with one or two hit singles and a lot of filler.
You can’t get away with that anymore.
New album just dropped today for a band I enjoy but wasn’t paying attention to. Three others have albums coming out in August, one in September. Many of my favourites released albums in 2024.
I have or will purchase the full albums off bandcamp (and add extra to the price).
I’m sure there’s lots more I’m unaware of but I think most singles actually end up on albums still, or at least on 3-5 song collab EPs.
At least in the punk and adjacent world.
Does the vinyl industry know about this? Because they keep puttin’ something in those sleeves.
And the term “album” is a holdover from the days of shellac records, when individual discs with a few minutes of music on each side were sold in paper sleeves that were bound photo album-style between cardboard covers.
The Beatles recorded their first album in a day, using a two-track machine. Today’s musicians can use 64 tracks and essentially can polish every note individually. Not everyone uses all that technology, but most big acts take advantage of it.
Multi-track recordings go way, way back. Remember Bohemian Rhapsody? That was 50 years ago, and was far from the first. There is nothing new in artists spending hellish amounts of time polishing the individual tracks of their next song.
Yes, album sales are down and artists need to tour to make money, but the scarcification of album releases happened decades ago. It was in the early 90’s, I think, when I took notice of how major bands / artists take two or three years or more to make an album, in stark contrast to how it used to be.
An album per year used to be a sort of a standard, but many acts put out up to two albums per calendar year. And the astounding aspect of that is, they were quality records, with plenty of hits and classics-to-be!
Albums also used to be 40ish minutes long, but with the advent of the CD era, 60 - 70 minute albums became common. That’s 15 or so songs against 10 or so, known as CD bloat, which didn’t improve album quality, but it isn’t the whole picture: one or two 10-song albums per year is still way much more music than 15 songs every two or three years.
It’s harder to come up with (listenable) original music these days than it used to be, as most varieties have been done a 1000 times over. That, I think is the biggest reason.
The fans felt betrayed – betrayed I tell ya – when Eagles took almost three years to follow up Hotel California. They’d been putting out an album each year since the debut:
Eagles (June 1st 1972)
Desperado (April 17 1973)
On the Border (March 22 1974)
One of These Nights (June 10 1975)
Hotel California (December 8 1976)
…
The Long Run (September 24 1979)
(Yes I’m well aware of all the infighting going on, even well before HC)
Fans expected, as in demanded, that a follow up should come within a year.
Let’s look at some other acts and their releases back then. First, there’s the insanity of CCR. All their classic albums were released in 23 months. That five albums and an average of 140 days between each album. And as noted upthread. they were touring – internationally too.
Elton John released his first nine albums in six years. Bowie released 13 albums in eleven years. LZ released I-IV in a litte less than three years. Even when large multitrack and digital equipment started to be commonplace, a yearly release was still common. Van Halen’s first six albums dropped in six years.
[TL;DR] Today – well music is made in the same ways movies are, by committee. The 60's to 80' were an anomaly in both cases. I don't want too pin down to exact numbers, years and artist, because there are lots of exceptions, but i roughly goes like this: Up to the 60's, movies were made in the old Studio System. There were very few directors that had name recognition and the Stars we're hired hands, bound by contracts. The music industry had songwriters (e.g. Tin Pan Ally) and singers delivering the art/product/content, usually good looking or at least charismatic. The 60's rolled around and most of us here at the Dope grew up with a totally different mindset to music and movies. The creators took front stage. Directors became their own brands, actors – if they were lucky enough – could pick projects based on bankability. Musicians started performing their own songs, and for us GenXers having a song writing machine behind the artist was a betrayal of artistic integrity: *cf.* Milli Vanilli, Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer.
And now major music hits have 13 song writers and the star of the movie is the character, not the actor, who is usually behind a mask and replaceable. We’re back to where we were before 1960 and the media conglomerates are more powerful than ever before.
To expand Charlie’s list a bit:
Black Sabbath put out two albums in 1970, and another in 1971
Uriah Heep put out two albums in both 1971 and 1972
Yes put out two albums in 1971, and another in 1972
Nazareth put out two albums in 1973, and another in 1974
Queen put out two albums in 1974, and another in 1975
Sparks put out two albums in 1974, and another in 1975
Not only was the play-life of pop/rock singles pretty limited in the 60s and 70s, record companies knew (or thought they knew) that their target market was going to age out of a performer pretty quickly. “Who the heck is going to buy Bobby Sherman albums after they turn 18? Slap one or two acceptable singles on each album and get them out the door as quick as you can!”
An excellent example of this was the release of the Beatles albums in the US. I doubt that the record companies thought that 40 and 50 YOs would still be fans, choosing between the (more original) UK and US albums that many years later.
This is understandable and fits right in with the typical views of news media. “There’s no point in writing follow-up stories about the guy who ate his own foot if you wait months to do it.”
Taylor Swift, certainly an example of a popular musician who releases a lot of albums, has tended to release an album of new material every two years, but cranked out three in 2019-2020, and on top of this steady pace, re-recorded two old albums in 2021 and another two in 2023. Also a bunch of live albums and EPs. Including the live albums and re-recordings, she’s averaging one new album a year for 20 years (assuming the album she’s working on now releases in 2026).
She is an outlier. Studio time is expensive and most popular musicians hit a wall of diminishing returns after the first two or three albums. I remember some very popular hair metal bands in the 90s who had to either sit out the Grunge era, or try to fit into it, and cranking out as many albums as possible just wasn’t a good idea for a lot of bands. In the age of Apple Music and Spotify, maybe it still isn’t.
If you’re as a big as Taylor Swift, studio time and costs are no concern at all.
Generally considered to have been created by Les Paul, circa 1948-49. So, yeah, almost 80 years.
While “album” releases may be less frequent, the new generation of musicians doesn’t necessarily treat an album as an immutable product. Olivia Rodrigo (shaping up to be the Gen-Z Taylor Swift) released her only two albums two years apart (2021 and 2023), with rumors of her third dropping in 2025. But her second album, Guts, had “secret songs” not on vinyl and then a “deluxe” release with additional songs only months after the first release. Vinyl albums still have definitive release dates, but the world of streaming allows artists to tinker and expand on an album for years.
I think albums getting rare is a total myth. I get a newsletter per mail every Friday (it has become the standard release day) about new albums, and there are always a lot, maybe more than in the classic vinyl days. Here’s the list from this week: