“alBumS aRE dEad iTs aLL abOuT SinGLeS nOW bRo”

Some of the stupidest YouTubers love to say controversial things like "The Album is Dead" since it gets them views and money for their stupid course. But have you ever noticed every artist you love cares a lot about the albums they make and really puts effort into them? It's almost like those course-selling YouTubers are full of shit about everything.

The fact is, an album is often a point where you can make an artistic statement or end an era where your fans reflect upon your music. It's also a way to make money and boost your fans' enthusiasm, creating a moment to call attention to yourself and build a fanbase.

Understanding the Concept of an Album

Now, one of the things we should first establish is, what is an album? Since my comments section is often really confused about this.

One of the funny things about albums is in the roughly 75 years they've existed, they've been basically the same exact thing: a way to say that a particular group of songs all belong together under one title. Until about 20 years ago, they existed solely in physical form - evidence that at some point you considered these songs a cohesive collection.

But even those would change from time to time. Like when Body Count had to pull their absolute banger of a song, "Cop Killer", off their classic debut. And when The Strokes had to pull "New York City Cops" off their classic debut. Funny thing: both records had to be changed for the same reason…really makes you think…Anyway, there's proof that both of those existed.

The Evolution of Albums in the Digital Era

Digital Fluidity vs. Physical Permanence

Albums in the streaming era have one critical difference - they can be altered after release, with the old version disappearing entirely. In today's digital landscape, you could rearrange songs between albums weekly if you wanted to… Ugh, I know I just gave some genius the dumbest idea possible. God help us.

Physical Format Variations

I know many of you think physical and digital albums must match. Chief, that hasn't been true in god knows how long. For decades, vinyl versions have had different track counts than CDs or cassettes. Vinyl bonus tracks were huge in both the 90s and 2010s across various genres.

The Bottom Line

So what is an album? Really, whatever you decide it is this week. You can modify it through your distributor anytime or repress physical versions with different songs. However you express to your audience that these songs belong together, that's an album. The concept hasn't changed, but the ease of modification has. In the digital world, an album is essentially just an artist-sanctioned playlist. Because truly on the consulting calls I do with musicians, you all seem really confused about this.

Should Releasing an Album be an Artistic or Business Choice?

Art vs. Business

Most musicians create albums as artistic expressions, not just business decisions. Some of you overthink the marketing angle when sometimes it should simply be about your art. That said, albums inevitably serve both creative and commercial purposes, so let's examine how these intersect.

Cultural Impact

An album transcends its collection of songs - it becomes a cultural artifact that listeners interpret and discuss. This conversation creates organic marketing through word of mouth, reviews, and online discussions that introduce your music to new audiences.

Artist Statement

From your perspective as a creator, an album represents a statement with an underlying theme. This could be as straightforward as "here's what I've been working on" or as complex as a commentary on your genre's evolution. Whatever your message, articulating it clearly matters.

When you explain your album's concept through Instagram captions, interviews, behind-the-scenes videos, or written essays, you give your audience the language to discuss and share your work. While some artists can communicate purely through mystery and metaphor, most benefit from providing some context for listeners to connect with and champion their music

The Reality

And really, in a lot of genres, especially the more antiquated ones, you are judged by an album as to your career trajectory since now the world can see if your latest record has more or less streams. A general industry truth is if you're successful then have two less successful records, you're now a legacy artist and will get less and less opportunities until nostalgia brings you more opportunities in the way of 10-year anniversary tours, etc.

Albums Are For All Genres

But even outside Dad Rock, indie punk, and metal - the album-orientated rock genres - albums are a point where your scene checks in on your progress. And while that may scare you, if the reaction is good, this is what makes careers. Even in pop, hip hop, R&B, and electronic music, which are probably the least album-orientated genres, records are consumed less by the average user, meaning that the number of people who listen to singles will be drastically bigger than those who listen to the whole album. But there's a reason artists in these genres take albums seriously.

The Role of Albums in Artist-Listener Relationships

Albums can drive significant consumption. A fan who builds a strong relationship with you will financially support you, unlike someone who just hears you occasionally on a playlist.

Some of you are really uncomfortable being judged for your album. In fact, a lot of the biggest artists I've been in a room with have been crippled by fear of how their audience will react to a change in their sound. But really, whether you like it or not, all albums that get any public attention will be judged.

Mixtapes vs. LPs

This is why so many artists have been making mixtapes instead of albums - they provide psychological safety to experiment. Just look at Charli XCX when she was calling her initial experiments with visionary producers AG Cook and SOPHIE (my forever queen) as they redefined pop. FKA Twigs called Caprisongs a mixtape as it was a real departure from her last two LPs.

It's often a way for artists to adventure without having some guy with millions of followers judge them and having to talk about it for years to come. But really, these mixtapes talk like an album, look like an album, and walk like an album…but for some reason, we let artists dodge the heavy weight of album judgment when they call it a “mixtape”.

Album = Curated Coherent Vibes

But back to what albums actually are for artists. Sometimes an album can be defined by its vibe, emotion, or the genre palette you're working with for the time being. For example, in 2023, Skrillex put out two albums with totally different vibes across 27 songs. Really, he hit an inflection point in his career where it was time to tour, play Madison Square Garden, and a ton of festivals, and he wanted to call some attention to himself. But he had two totally different vibes of songs. So he just went in and separated the emotions out.

Spotify, TikTok, Instagram, and algorithmic platforms choose violence against anyone who's diverse with their music. This approach allows you to curate your own vibes and not have an album so long that no one will ever listen to it. Instead, you create a coherent statement that people can discuss.

Defining Your Era

There's also defining an album by your era, which could be a certain amount of years of your life. For example, the pop artist Lauv famously just waterfalled his "How I'm Feeling" record until he decided it was done and put a cap on the era. And if you don't know about that, I have tons of videos on my channel about waterfalling your music.

Charli XCX made one of the best pop records of all time with "How I'm Feeling Now" as a reflection of COVID-era lockdown emotions. But really, you can define an era in so many ways. This can be your sad fussy era as you explore your gender identity after a breakup or your banger era where you just make party music. Whatever it is, you need to just tell your audience about your era through your stories and content. And more frankly, if people care, the narrative will spread and people will often identify with it.

Album Promotion Strategy

This is a Moment

But really what I think is important when I wear my marketing hat instead of my producer or artist cap, is that this is all a moment to call attention to yourself. And what I mean by that is as long as your pre-order link is up and people can pre-save stuff from you, well, that does you good to keep promoting that album before it's out. But let's talk about what that looks like.

Albums vs Singles…The Rules Are Different

Now, we all know I'm the guy who started the conversation about how absolutely stupid it is when unknown, small artists tease their unreleased music, as it ruins so many opportunities. But since albums are not for new listeners as much as those who are curious about you, the rules are a little different.

An album could be how someone first takes you in. Odds are, the reason anyone is going to listen to your album is 2 things:

1. Curiosity has been created.

2. Hype has been created around you. Somebody's heard a little bit about you and maybe it's time they finally give you a chance.

So while singles and music videos are often the samples we use to get most people interested in an artist, an album is the moment where we tell people to focus on you as you're about to go off and potentially really grow the relationship with the listener. Since we all know when someone makes a great album, our relationship with the artist grows immensely as compared to when they put out a bunch of singles, some of which are often mid at best and others are ones we rinse.

You're absolutely right - those two quotes are saying nearly the same thing. Let me refine this section to eliminate the redundancy and make the message clearer:

Albums Are Conversation Pieces/Biggest ROI

Occasionally some nerd will review your single on TikTok. Albums are what truly get talked about, inspiring writers, influencers, and YouTubers to create conversations around you that resonate throughout your genre. If you do something exceptional with an album, you create a moment where you appear everywhere at once, which significantly grows your audience.

Since albums are more profitable by nature, they justify investment in billboards and other marketing with better return on investment. When tastemakers see your album getting coverage across multiple platforms, they feel compelled to join the conversation. This is exactly why putting out an album that really blows up follows what I've outlined in my community video.

It’s Time To Get Those Co-Signs

You should contact all the influential people in your genre and make sure they receive a copy of your record. The more people talk about it, the more likely music lovers will feel the need to listen. While a single can get you some attention, many of the tastemakers who can elevate you to a larger fanbase will only pay attention to a full album.

Do Your Community Work!

And this is why making sure you do your community work and identify these tastemakers is crucial. This preparation ensures you get that fan base growth when you put out your album. And if you don't know what I'm talking about with community work, check out my resource guide. But what I'm really saying here is when you've built momentum and put in the work, releasing an album can be the catalyst for that significant audience boost you've been working toward.

Financial Benefits of Releasing an Album

Pre-Order Campaigns

I kind of skipped one of the main reasons to release an album - the fact is pre-order bundles of shirts, weird merchandise packages, VIP packages, vinyl, cassettes, and the million concepts artists come up with are frankly how you drive up sales and create walking advertisements for your music. You know, the shirts, hoodies, or those stupid bucket hats (AKA merch). These are items you can sell via pre-order for current fans since you've been rolling out singles and they are excited to hear your LP before you potentially disappoint them with a bunch of mid-album tracks.

Because if I have to hear your record is “nothing but bangers” one more time when they really sound like a bad version of Skrillex's "Bangarang," I'll stop listening. But the reality is many of your favorite albums exist because some artist needed money to fund a tour, child support, their next venture, or their manager or label said, "Well, those singles you've been dropping sure would go well together and we could run a pre-order campaign and make a ton of money."

New Opportunities with Pre-Orders

All this is to say doing a great job bundling posters and putting things your fans really want in this pre-order can drive up profits, but also do a lot of marketing work. Famously, my aforementioned my forever-queen SOPHIE bundled the “Sophie double dildo” and got herself a lot of attention, which of course is iconic.

Anyway, a lot of album marketing is getting people excited to drive this up since pre-orders also determine chart positions, since buying physical albums weighs more on the charts. And if you can get even some position on the heat seekers or chart of your genre, you can do a lot of bragging that gets pitches for festivals, opening slots, and other opportunity doors open.

Providing a Way for Fans To Go Deeper

But even if you're not quite ready for chart positions, what an album can do is give your listeners an experience that grows deeper and racks up streams for 12, 14, 18, or however many songs you include. This continually keeps you on the minds of fans so they spread the word and build a relationship that's more likely to help you grow.

Which brings me to a metaphor that's pretty right for this. When you put out an album, it's like getting a bigger rock to throw in a pond. While releasing five to eight-ish singles before an album is becoming commonplace, the hype and discussion that goes along with an album really helps make this ripple go bigger. And the bigger this record does, the more you are set up for success later.

Albums also drive consumption, raising your streams and metrics as people listen to them for the rest of your career. That's going to be a baseline of numbers you can build off. As you grow, people are going to look at those metrics to decide if you should get big opportunities like the ones I just mentioned. After all, you should craft a compelling story around this album to get people interested in it.

Keeping the Conversation Fresh

But let's also talk about some actionable things you can do after your album is out to keep pushing it. Once your album comes out, put up a full-album version of it on YouTube where it's just one video with chapters marked off where each song starts. You should obviously release the rest of the songs individually, but if you really want to go big, you can do all sorts of graphical things.

You can put up lyric videos for the different songs, or if you really want to go big, follow Quadeca's approach. He released a few of my favorite songs in recent years and put up a full version of his record as a single artistic video. But you can even just do this with the album cover as the visual since this will encourage people to build a relationship with the whole record and listen to it as a complete work.

Albums Are Immortal

But also remember another thing, albums kind of last forever - or for at least as long as we have this world. So you should put your release in a calendar so you can call attention to it every year. If the album really does well, a lot of artists put up merch from that record again every year for 48 hours to try to capture some money. Because reminding people of a record they loved often reignites interest in you and leads them to stream your new material since old material is the best promoter of new material, just as new material promotes your old material better than anything else.

Find New Ways To Remind Fans

But really you want to keep the conversation going around your record. That's the question you should be asking yourself after it comes out. This can be sharing user-generated content - aka the stuff your fans make - around your music. A lot of artists make alternative versions of songs after the record's been out for a year to keep changing the conversation around the record. These can be new features on a song where you switch up the verse or the bridge with some new artist, collaborations, acoustic versions, remixes, or even a full remix album.

This approach helps the algorithm see you as tied to the artists who do remixes of you and creates connections to different versions of your song, reiterating the hook which can help the song spread. In my opinion, this isn't done nearly enough.

For rock, an example I think of all the time is MJ Lenderman (of Wednesday) who did a split cover record with Narrowhead where they covered each other's songs. Their last records came out about 2 years ago, effectively reigniting interest in the songs and helping the algorithm connect them.

Single Promo Strategy… But For an Album

Many people wonder about music videos and whether they should come out after a record drops. All those songs that came out with your record on drop day can get music videos if you want to keep the conversation going. In the TikTok era, I see no reason why after your LP is out you can't spend one to two months trying to push each song on the record. While I've not personally seen anyone do that yet, I've advised a few artists to try it since I think it'll end up being huge.

What's so game-changing about the earworm era of shorts is that songs are often finding new listeners or reconnecting with people who already like a song. It doesn't matter how old they are because no one checks the birthdate of a song to see if they should like it or not.

Deluxe Edition Strategy

Another way people reignite interest in a record is to make a deluxe edition. Not only does this make it seem like the record was a success but it reignites interest in a record again by adding songs to it. These can be new songs or songs that didn't make it to the record, but you can add them, call it a new version, and make it seem like a big deal to reignite relationships with it.

But really the thought I have on how to market an album is to keep continuing a conversation around it. Promote it with stories until it's time to move on to a new era of songs, and that's often an artistic choice on how to leave it and separate an era for you to decide artistically.

The real fact of the matter is this: the longer you keep your album in people's minds through Instagram and TikTok stories and content, the more mileage you'll get from the record that listeners love. This ongoing promotion is effective because as long as people are listening, they're likely talking about your music, which grows your audience and builds momentum for your next release.