The following op/ed comes from Eamonn Forde (pictured inside), a longtime music journalist and author of The Last Days of EMI: Selling a Pig. Ford is based in the UK New book, Leaving the building: The lucrative afterlife of the music estatesNow available through Omnibus Press.
Back in November 2007, shortly after paying £4.2 billion for EMI, Guy Hands of Terra Firma upset people by suggesting that some artists were more interested in “Negotiate for maximum advance” (“advances are often never repaid”) compared to them getting on the creative wheel. This is a situation that cannot continue, he said, and as a result, Terra Firma will be “more selective than who we choose to work with” in the future.
This is read as the Hand that accuses artists of laziness. He vehemently denied this, arguing that the leaked internal memo that the quotes came from was intentionally misinterpreted.
Terra Firma’s EMI management ended up going so badly that it became what the books were about. um. But American rapper Meek Mill’s 2023 release strategy may be what prompted the Hands to get their hands on party streamers. Or can capture the salt smell.
Mill is planning to release four albums this yearneatly allocate one for each quarter, with catching dream is the title of the album Q1. “I uploaded for some reason, let’s play ball!” he say on Instagram when he announced his plan.
The last time he released a studio album (Expensive pain) in October 2021, his fifth the words Dreams & Nightmares in 2012. He had a lot more success with his mixtape from 2006 to 2013, so no one can accuse him of hiding.
His 2023 four-way mission is still lagging behind The Lizard King & The Lizard Sorcerer, who released five albums in 2017 and five more in 2022, but that still leaves The Beatles, The Kinks, Bob Dylan, and other famous artists of the ’60s indifferent to the pinnacle.” two albums in a year”. Or others like Deep Purple, Cliff Richard, The Searchers, The Monkees, The Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Frank Zappa, who all manage three or more in a 12-month period.
Of course, these activities were in the grip of a hot creative period in the 1960s and early 1970s, but they were also concerned that their careers would become ephemeral because that was often the way of pop music at the time. Better release as much music as possible now before the curtain falls on your time on stage.
Sometimes, actions also hit their creative stride, and ideas come out of them faster than they can jot them down. Prince is a prime example of this and his Paisley Park vault is full of “thousands of unreleased songs” that would give his fortune decades to play.
His ferocious abundance is one factor in his bitter dispute with Warner Bros. in the 1990s. He wanted to put out the music when it was made; they wanted to put out the right music with carefully planned marketing cycles, typically an album every few years. The needs of the artist and the needs of the business have never been so contradictory.
Prince turned to Warner Bros. Marylou Badeaux to see if she could convince senior executives there to let him release the music when it was ready.
“I would tell him that backfires, that people can only absorb so much music by one artist at a time,” she said. billboards. his reaction when presented with this company’s hurdle is to ask, “What do I do? Music just flows through me.
Art doesn’t run on a 9 out of 5 basis, with artists punching in and punching out every day. Albums can be made at lightning speed. Also, for a variety of reasons, albums can also take years – possibly decades – to complete.
Even individual songs can be painful. popular, Leonard Cohen to Bob Dylan that it took him about seven years to perfect ‘Hallelujah’ until he was finally satisfied with it being released. Dylan, in a typical Dylanesque power move of mockery, tyranny, distraction, sarcasm and exaggeration, said his songs took 15 minutes to write.
In the age of LPs and CDs, productivity is somewhat constrained by the production capabilities of press mills and distribution logistics. An album can be written and recorded in a few days, but it still takes weeks or months to reach the masses. There is a built-in cycle here that artists have to accept as usual. They could only move as fast as the machine they completely depended on allowed.
In the digital age, there is generally a minimum data entry delay on a DSP of a few days, though sound cloud and YouTube allows instant release to occur.
As Prince discovered in the 1990s, the problem is that when artists capture inspiration, they can move at one speed, but audiences are often trained/conditioned to move with a other speed. It may take them weeks/months/years to even find an album and then may want to spend weeks/months/years immersed in it and uncovering every nook and cranny.
Besides being creative, the Meek Mill plan of the year is also a huge marketing campaign, positioning release frequency as part of an artistic whole.
It’s also possible that he’s hoping to break records – say the most number one/top 10 albums in a calendar year. Indie fans of a certain age will recall that, in 1992, The Wedding Present released a single a month for an entire year with a plan to equal Elvis Presley’s UK chart record record. with 12 hits in the top 30 in a year. (The band likes the idea and concept of deadlines so much that they revived it last year.)
“The four Mill albums lie perfectly within the overlap of a Venn diagram made up of three circles: Free artistic expression; No-regret marketing gimmick; and a Faustian pact to provide DSP algorithms.”
For Mill, it may all be a combination of a marketing angle and a profound artistic statement, but there’s something about it like a solution to a problem, especially when you have to. balance the benefits of that productivity with the potential negative impact on both. workload and quality control.
An artist must do whatever they can in 2023 to stand out, find a way to get people interested in their specific tracks and not other estimated tracks. 100,000 tracks released every day. If you can make music convincingly and often enough, this can trigger streaming algorithms so your music generates X streams, then Y streams, and if played at the right time and at the right time, self-propulsion takes over and the engine runs as beautiful as pure poetry. But that is far from a certain. It also locks you into a faster spinning hamster wheel.
Mill’s four albums lie perfectly within the overlap of a Venn diagram made up of three circles: Free artistic expression; No-regret marketing gimmick; and the Faustian Treaty to provide DSP algorithms.
There is, however, a very important fourth circle that is factored in here, but it is one that may not be as neatly organized as the other three: The boundless possibility of public interest. Global Music Business
