Everything's a Single Now
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I’m losing my fucking mind.
Here I sit late on a Thursday night, listening to a playlist of Boygenius songs and thinking, “what should I throw on next?” Curious to see what new releases just dropped, I return to the Spotify home page and click on the little bell up at the top to see “What’s New.”
I’m met with two songs from Trippie Redd: “COLORS (feat. Kodak Black)” and “ROCK OUT (feat. Chief Keef).” Whatever. I scroll past a few other uninteresting singles from some random artists and soon find myself face-to-face with another wall of Trippie Redd songs.
This time, I’m looking at “COLORS (feat. Kodak Black)” (the Explicit version), then “WHO ELSE! (feat. Rich The Kid),” and “TOILET WATER (feat. Ski Mask The Slump God).” I desperately want to know the inner world of the guy who comes up with song titles such as these.
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Befuddled, I click on Trippie Redd’s artist page and immediately see that I have him “blocked” within the platform. The “don’t play this artist” option is a handy mobile feature that prevents an artist from playing on Spotify Radio, but apparently doesn’t prevent you from seeing their songs on your new release page. Curious.
Once I arrived at Trippie Redd’s artist page, I realized he had just released his fifth studio album, “MANSION MUSIC” (emphatic capitalization his, not mine). I also remembered much hubbub happening online when the star-studded tracklist was first unveiled earlier in the week. Everyone from Travis Scott and Future to Dababy and Lil B are featured on the Chief Keef-produced LP. It’s a regular who’s who of the rap scene as it stood four years ago, but the names are undoubtedly attention-grabbing. On one end of the spectrum, viral tweets compared the lineup to the “Assemble” shot from Avengers: Endgame; on the other end, some music fans criticized Trippie Redd for leaning on the crutch of guest features. Elsewhere, people were more non-plussed, admitting that they viewed the album “as a playlist” and would treat it as such.
Those viewpoints are all valid, but I’d like to bring you back to my perspective, staring at Trippie Redd’s blocked Spotify page on my phone late on a Thursday evening. I scrolled down to see that MANSION MUSIC had indeed been released and was pinned as an “Artist Pick” at the top of his profile.
I clicked on the album and saw the exact same songs that were clogging up my feed before. “COLORS,” “ROCK OUT,” even “TOILET WATER,” they were all here—twenty-five songs, one hour and sixteen minutes of fresh Trippied Redd content, there for the taking.
I had zero interest in listening to any of these songs, especially coming off a Sleepytime Tea and 47 minutes of Boygenius. Curious and confused, I scrolled down Mr. Redd’s page and pressed “See discography,” then made my way to his singles. There they were. Twenty-five entries; every song from his fifth album also released as individual singles on the same day. Do you know how long 25 releases look in Spotify? Twenty-five squares of identical vertically-stacked album art? It’s a lot. Actually, here’s a photo so you can see what the 25 songs look like all together.
Technically 21 because a few singles dropped before the album, had different art, and were separated by other Trippie Redd features.
It wasn’t until I was struck with this unruly scroll of singles that I remembered I had seen this recently once before… French Montana. Imagine I read that line like Josh Peck.
Just two weeks earlier, on January 6th, French Montana had released Coke Boys 6: Money Heist Edition. The release is a 29-song affair clocking in at a collective 82 minutes, fun fact: that’s just a hair longer than Army of Darkness. If you’re a regular reader of this site, you could probably guess which one I would rather spend an hour and a half with.
I will say, credit to French Montana (a sentence I never thought I’d write), Coke Boys 6 is *technically* a collaborative mixtape meant to show off the Coke Boys Records stable of artists and some loosely associated friends. Much like Slime Language or Quality Control, these tapes are inherently sprawling, meant to promote these labels and their lineups. Sometimes these releases take a more collective bent like the A$AP Mob tapes or Bankroll Mafia; other times, they have a blatantly commercial purpose and, ironically, lack any sort of quality control.
At least French Montana had the decency to create unique album art for each single.
In either case, this is a post-Culture II landscape, and modern hip-hop/trap is no stranger to overstuffed tracklists. For an artist as mid as Trippie Red or Rich The Kid, their presence alone isn’t enough to justify a track; they must symbiotically congeal with another rapper (or two) in an attempt to string together a hit.
And that’s precisely why these songs are all being released as singles all at once; you never know which one will catch on. If you have all your songs listed as singles, people won’t know it’s part of an album or a larger collection of music, they’ll just take it at face value as “TOILET WATER (feat. Ski Mask The Slump God).” I mean, that really does tell me all I need to know.
I probably sound like an old fuck bitching about an artist putting out too many singles, but like most of my recent theorizing, I write all this just to document weird trends as I notice them. This is as much for me to look back, point to, and say, “hah! I knew I was on to something” as much as it is for you to read. I could postulate that this trend represents the “death of the album” or make a case for some type of Spotify Payola, given that I saw all those singles even though I don’t follow Trippie Redd and have him blocked… but to be honest, I don’t have some big, grand point to make. I don’t have those answers, I just wanted to write about the surreal experience of seeing the same thing pop up 20-plus times in my new release feed. At the very best, this shit’s a nuisance. At worst, we’re witnessing the beginning of a trend that will clog the arteries of pop artists’ pages for years to come. Time will tell if this strategy plays out for these musicians, but for now, I think I’ll stick to my “old school” records.
