Why Are Artists Breaking Up Their Albums Into Separate Releases?

The album isn’t dead, it’s just changing shape. Again. Since its inception, the album format—and its accompanying marketing—has been forced to adapt to shifting technologies in order to stay relevant. The streaming era has already brought us newfangled twists like albums as playlists, albums as works in progress, and albums as super-long exercises in indulgence. Now, there’s another growing trend: Albums that are released in chunks.

This year, artists as musically varied as indie singer-songwriter Moses Sumney, pop-punk bandleader Hayley Williams, and country duo Maddie & Tae are dropping their new albums in two or more multi-song installments, each spaced out over months. With streaming more dominant than ever, putting out an album in parts could be a savvy way for artists to pursue their creative ambitions while catering to a commercial environment that’s defined by the neverending scroll.

Managers and labels who’ve taken the multi-part plunge tend to insist that it all begins with their artists’ visions. But some also acknowledge that serialized albums reflect the commercial reality of the Spotify era. “All of this comes down to streaming,” one indie label campaign manager tells me.

The trend of multiple EP-length records building into an album extends—and often coexists with—the recent industry practice of leading up to an album with an extended cascade of individual tracks, or the way a young rapper might generate excitement with a string of loosies. Releasing different parts of an album in chunks ideally keeps fans coming back, generating more streams than if the label had just put out a couple of singles and then the album. An extra street date also offers an extra chance to point listeners toward the music on streaming services, with more potential for playlist placements and homepage marquee takeovers.

As is the case with most music industry innovations nowadays, the multi-part album release strategy has roots in the world of rap. In July 2018, South Florida rapper Denzel Curry released his album TA13OO in three “acts” across three consecutive days, with each one meant to convey a different musical vision. Curry had the idea for a concept album, his managers Mark Maturah and Rees Escobar recall, and they all developed the three-part rollout in discussions with Curry’s label, Universal-affiliated Loma Vista. “You throw away the sort of ridiculous tradition of first-week streaming,” Escobar explains, referring to the industry’s focus on opening numbers, “and approach it in a more artistic way.” Then, in April of last year, Kevin Abstract of hip-hop group BROCKHAMPTON released his album Arizona Baby in three parts across three different weeks. Abstract has described the project as a coping mechanism: “I was just trying to make something that could help me get through my shit.”

Last spring, the multi-part strategy moved into the realm of indie rock, when the cultishly beloved singer-songwriter Bill Callahan released his latest album, Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, one vinyl-side-long batch of songs at a time across four weeks. The 53-year-old explained that his motivation behind the move was to combat the endless distraction of streaming: “I know from my own experience with streaming that it’s really tempting to—even if you’re enjoying the song—wonder what’s next and skip through it. So we wanted to sort of just roll the record out slowly.”

Callahan was on to something. At this point, millennials spend about 21 hours a week listening to music, according to the research firm MusicWatch—but they spend nearly double that amount of time watching TV and movies combined (not to mention all the other entertainment options in people’s lives, like podcasts, reading, and social media). “From an artist’s perspective, the distraction factor is really high,” says MusicWatch managing director Russ Crupnick. “And there’s so much on the streaming services themselves.” So pacing an album over a few months, with a coordinated social media campaign, could help artists grab listeners’ much-divided attention. Adds Crupnick, “Every study we do around social says the No. 1 thing fans want to hear about is new releases from their artists.”

Touring, where many artists make the bulk of their money, can also be a factor behind the decision to serialize an album. On April 10, Maddie & Tae, the duo behind 2014’s bro-skewering hit “Girl in a Country Song,” will release The Way It Feels. The album contains all 10 songs released on a pair of 2019 EPs, plus five new songs. Cindy Mabe, president of Maddie & Tae’s label UMG Nashville, tells me that putting out those first chunks of the album while the duo opened for Carrie Underwood and Lady Antebellum last year was critical. Mabe stresses that a multi-part release strategy suits the real-life nature of Maddie & Tae’s songwriting too. “It is their story and they continued to live it in real time as we were rolling out tracks,” she says.

Hayley Williams’ upcoming debut solo album, Petals for Armor, is due out May 8. But on February 6, the Paramore singer-songwriter released Petals for Armor I, featuring five tracks that are moodier and more somber than anything she’s done before. “It’s a way to include people on the journey in the same way that I experienced it,” she said in a press release.

For a listener, hearing an album in parts seems like an intrinsically different experience from taking it in all at once. Clicking “play” on an anticipated new LP only to find out the first couple of tracks were previously released as singles is one thing. But what about when the full album finally comes out and you’ve already heard two-thirds of it? The conversation around the music could shift too, both for better—if one of the release dates happens to fall on a major news day, there will still be other chances to talk about the album—and potentially for worse, if listeners and critics end up overlooking a great album because they’ve underrated its separate parts.

As with any commercial packaging for music, whether these broken-up albums succeed artistically depends on how they’re employed. Moses Sumney released the first part of his double album græ on February 21, with the rest to follow on May 15. “In a lot of ways it was an experiment for us,” says Nick Blandford, managing director at Secretly Group, which includes Sumney’s label Jagjaguwar. “Attention spans are short. We can’t change that. But we wanted to try and play with it a bit.”

Perhaps, for albums that demand intense and repeated listening, split release dates could prove to be a new normal. Sumney says that he feels like grae, at 20 tracks and more than an hour long, is too much for one sitting. “It is the long albums that you have to think about and listen to multiple times in order to really get,” he explains. “So, I released them how I would like them to be consumed. Sit with part one, listen again, digest, maybe read some lyrics if you get that deep with it. And then get part two, and do the same thing. Hopefully, people will make it to the end.”

Additional reporting by Rawiya Kameir

Originally Appeared on Pitchfork