The Big Questions The hell of being prolific: Are musicians making too much music?

Here’s a statistic that may or may not surprise you: Listening to every song The Beatles officially released during their eight-year recording career—all their albums, EPs, singles, and B-sides—would take a little less than 10 hours. You could start with Please Please Me as you set off to work, and finish up with Let It Be while arriving home from your evening commute. Whether this comes as a surprise might have to do with your familiarity with The Beatles, and the circumstances under which they recorded their body of work; they wrote short songs for much of their career, and once they became the biggest band in the world, demand for their product was high. The Beatles stopped touring a little more than halfway through their careers, leaving themselves a lot of time to create and release new material, and with three solid songwriters in the group, they never lacked for inspiration. They were, even by the singles-driven standards of the 1960s, a prolific band.

Here’s another statistic that also may or may not surprise you: Listening to every song officially released by Animal Collective during a similar timeframe would take you almost exactly the same amount of time, to the minute. It surprised me, and it was, to an extent, the impetus for this essay. Animal Collective certainly doesn’t write short songs, it has a fierce touring schedule, and it’s hardly the most popular rock group on the planet. And yet there it is, taking up as much space in my iTunes library as the Fab Four. Surely this can’t be… normal, can it?

Well, no. As I said, The Beatles were prolific. But plenty of bands in the 2000s rival or surpass the biggest names of the past in terms of sheer fecundity: groups like The Dirty Projectors, The Thermals, The Mountain Goats, and The Fiery Furnaces far outstrip the bands of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s in terms of recorded output. Spoon has put out almost as many EPs as The Beatles put out albums, and Belle And Sebastian’s recorded output from 1996 to 2006 exceeds that of The Rolling Stones from 1970 to 1980. And none of this even counts the solo projects of the bands I’ve named; Jack White alone has amassed a body of work to rival any of the rock stars after whom he’s patterned his career.

So what? So bands are, as a rule, a lot more prolific these days than in the past. The reasons why are an interesting story, one by which you can trace the impact of almost every economic and technological development on the music industry since the birth of the album format and the ascendance of rock ’n’ roll in the early 1960s. But the important question—the one music fans and critics are likely to ask themselves with increasing frequency as time goes on—is “Is it a good thing for music?”

Much has been written about the way band management by labels has changed for the worse since the late 1980s, when the music industry began to undergo the tectonic shifts that transformed it into the shambolic mess it is today. One of the key changes is the death of the traditional A&R system, which once carefully nursed promising bands and supported them on a regional basis, giving them a chance to build an audience, hone their chops, and develop their craft. For a number of reasons—greed, impatience, and the kind of aversion to risk that comes with bad economic times—that system is long gone. Bands are no longer allowed to develop; once they’re signed, they tend to be pushed into the studio right away to record, regardless of whether they have anything worth recording. Thanks to Clear Channel-style market consolidation, regional markets are a thing of the past. And while a few bands at the very top (think of the way The Strokes were handled, for example) are allowed the luxury of waiting a few years between albums, now it’s straight into the studio. And if the first effort doesn’t immediately find an audience, a second one isn’t likely.

But this only explains the changes in the way major labels handle their artists. What of the indie labels, to which so many of the bands I mentioned at the top of this essay are signed? In many ways, they’re victims of the negative consequences of a pair of trends in the music industry that are, overall, positive: the rapid growth of technology, and the democratization of the music business. The former has allowed bands, through digital recording and distribution, to record more music for less money, and to get that music to a much wider audience than ever before with a smaller investment of time and resources. The latter has tended to remove a band’s dependence on a big label, its reliance on a manager, and its need to answer to record-company bigwigs. For the most part, that’s a good thing, especially considering the kind of bad choices industry executives have made lately. But it’s also removed from the equation any sort of editorial check on the material being released. With a supportive label, a band can manage and produce itself, can enter the studio and release a finished album without anyone outside the group asking whether it’s good work. When was the last time a band at this level got sent back into the booth with orders to not come out until it has something worth releasing?

Of course, another reason for these changes is the economic nosedive the industry has taken. With far less money to be made from the sale of traditional recorded material, it’s hard to blame bands for putting out everything they can and getting out while the getting is good. But it isn’t just the bands and labels that have changed; these same issues, technology and democratization, have likewise changed the way music is consumed by fans and perceived by critics. Albums no longer need to take up physical space, and there are no boundaries for how they are experienced; clever, unscrupulous fans can own every song in Animal Collective’s massive discography for free with an afternoon’s work, and take it with them wherever they go. But it’s scarcely a unique observation that this transforms people into collectors, not listeners. Critics, too, suffer from material overload, and faced with the possibility of a band putting out in five years what would once take 10, begin to judge the band in terms of its general sensibility instead of the much harder task of actually listening to everything they put out. More than this, the tendency toward profligacy ruins the mystery of a band. Once you decide you’re going to release absolutely everything you record, listeners are more or less forced to take the bad with the good.

This may be a case of questioning the seaworthiness of a ship that’s already sailed. Technology is only going to make it simpler for more bands to put out more music, and with no economic penalty for releasing crap, more crap is going to be released. Likewise, the big labels will likely never again be on the kind of economic footing such that they can impose editorial hands, both nurturing and punishing, on their acts. And honestly, it isn’t the worst thing in the world for a band to release stuff that would, in previous generations, have ended up on the cutting-room floor or in the songwriter’s imagination; there was a time when an album like The Fiery Furnaces’ Rehearsing My Choir would have killed a career. But democratization is forever at odds with meritocracy, and the more prolific the majority of bands become, the more we have to hope for those few artists with the good sense to know when to hold ’em.