Streaming Expands Album Cycles

Artists are ensuring that they stay in the conversation all year long by releasing remixed and expanded albums that increase their lifecycles.

Why It Hits: The ease and immediacy of streaming is turning album rollouts into strategic plays, allowing artists to time releases in an effort to juice tour sales and game the Billboard charts.

Behind The Cover: Charli XCX is ensuring that brat season never ends.

• The artist released Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat last Friday to keep the album of the summer playing even as the weather chills.
• It’s a similar strategy to Taylor Swift, who released three dozen versions of The Tortured Poets Department, which helped her to top the Billboard 200 chart for 15 weeks, blocking artists like Billie Eilish and Zach Bryan from hitting #1.
• Future and Metro Boomin have also been playing the game, releasing We Don’t Trust You in March and their follow-up, We Still Don’t Trust You, a month later.

Closing Track: The album-release-and-rerelease trend is likely here to stay, potentially overtaking what the single was last decade. Call it maximalist publicity. We wouldn’t be surprised if one truly ambitious artist decides to release only one more album in their lifetime, constantly iterating on the same record for the rest of their career to create the most epic album ever recorded. A life’s work, if you will.

Deeper Cut: Album releases aren’t the only aspect of music that streaming has remixed.