More Is More

A modest proposal to fix Nashville's worst instinct

There’s a meme in tech that the internet eats everything. Everything is computer. And these memes reflect a real truth. Technology is capable of touching everything, and because it’s capable, it’s inevitable. I’ve written in the past about Kevin Kelly’s theories about the nature of technology, how it flows like a river towards certain inevitabilities of connection. One of his key observations is what he calls Remixing — not in the small sense you encounter in a song title, but the deep tendency of technology to break any unified experience into its component parts, isolate them, and offer each piece à la carte. As I wrote about Kelly’s concept previously: “The arc of technology flows towards a remixed and customized existence. One in which the core elements of any object are separated and refined into their most essential components and presented anew.” So it’s not surprising that the compounding technological changes in music have changed things too.

The album has not been immune. The rigid technological limitations of bandwidth and storage once meant an album had a hard cap of about 10 songs and maybe half an hour. CDs loosened that. Streaming blew it up entirely, “Remixing” it into a malleable, shiftable, and very lengthy playlist adjacent medium for passive listening. Other than inertia, there’s no real reason an artist has to stick to 10 songs and 30 minutes anymore. Or even the more moderate 12-13 song, 40-45 minute version of an album. The constraint just… doesn’t exist.

But inertia and the collective expectations of audiences are a strong incentive for staid conservatism. The reason we see the idea of an album shifting is not because streaming allowed artists to play around with the concept of an album. Remix requires more incentives at play. Our reality is because streaming actively rewarded going past the old lines. The formula is simple. More songs, more streams, more money. I’m sure Drake’s Scorpion wasn’t the first album to figure this out, but in big pop music culture, it’s the first one that comes to mind when I think about this long album problem. I’ve complained about this plenty in my country reviews when looking at bulked-out albums chock full of filler, wasted space, albums that needed an editor badly. But that’s not precisely what we’re here to talk about today. Today we’re talking about the latest scourge that streaming hath wrought: the Deluxe Album.

Now look, repackaging albums is not a new idea by any stretch. Garth Brooks has been doing it in some form for probably 30 years at this point. Reissue the record with some bonus content, give people a reason to buy it again, juice a few extra dollars out of the catalog. It’s not fundamentally different from late 90’s thing where they pumped out Greatest Hits compilations, repackaged Greatest Hits compilations, remastered Greatest Hits compilations, and then the box set with demos for the complete experience. Fine. This has always happened to a point.

But as is technology’s nature, something new is going on. As the onslaught of releases grows, cheered on and enabled by the low-friction environment of streaming, it’s getting harder to hold attention with a single album. You can’t just put out a record and ride it for two years with a steady trickle of singles going to radio anymore. You have to pre-release, hype the fanbase, flood the zone with content, music videos, TikTok clips, and then keep working to keep the album alive in people’s consciousness long after release week.

And so, smartly (and unfortunately) the Deluxe Album has evolved into a deliberate strategy. Assume two to three years between records. About a year to a year and a half after release, you drop a Deluxe version with a new single to send to radio and, more importantly, playlists, and suddenly the album has a new life. People feel the need to go back and listen to the whole thing. There are now more tracks to be streamed. More revenue follows.

So why does this bother me? Well, partly because I’m an old curmudgeon. Okay, end of essay.

But here’s the real reason it matters. Albums, when an artist actually cares about them, have a logic to them that creates shape. An intro or closing track means something. An arc can be traced throughout. Kip Moore’s 2023 Damn Love ends with “Mickey’s Bar” — a haunting song that functions as the emotional encapsulation of everything that record is about, all the life regrets that have been filtering through the whole artistic entity. Now you slap five new songs after it and that’s not the ending anymore. The door Moore carefully closed is just… hanging open.

Furthermore, not to be super cranky, but most of the tracks that get added to deluxe editions were cut from the original album for a reason. In a world where some amount of curation is going into the record (not the Zach Bryan “anything I think of goes on the record” approach, but someone actually trying to build a curated experience) those tracks didn’t make the cut for good reasons. They rarely add anything to the story of the album. They’re just more of the same, ad nauseam. It’s not even the sheer commerciality that bothers me most. It’s the lack of artistry.

I noticed this going back to Jon Pardi’s Heartache Medication deluxe release, where he tacked on yet another few drinking songs to an album already copiously adorned with them. This past year I was especially rankled when Thomas Rhett pushed this concept past any reasonable limit, adding two or three songs to About a Woman multiple times throughout the year, with a rotating door of featured artists serving as a cheap mutual back-scratching advertisement — Shelton on one version of “Old Tricks,” Niall Horan on another. The whole thing felt cheap. Like watching someone keep repainting a house just to keep the paychecks coming. There are positive examples of deluxe editions that work, and if anything, they just further the point that careful judgement is needed to do this whole idea correctly. In recent years, off the top of my head, only Kassi Ashton’s Made From The Dirt: The Blooms utilized its extra space to enhance the original project. As I wrote in her review, “On the deluxe edition of the record, the added tracks often display more diverse sonic styles, opening things up and making for a more enjoyable experience without stretching too long and overstaying it’s welcome.”

The underlying instinct behind the Deluxe Album isn’t wrong. There is real value in releasing new material about a year after an album drops. You remind people you exist, and with today’s attention spans, you need that. You give radio, socials, and TikTok something to work with. The problem isn’t the strategy. It’s the lazy stapling of new stuff onto the old record and calling it done.

So here’s what I’d advocate for instead: the Expansion EP. It has the basic commercial logic. A year or so after the original record, you drop a handful of new songs. A fresh single drives some attention. The difference is you release it as a companion piece to the previous album, but it still stands on its own, released separately, with its own cover art and tracklist. Let it be in conversation with what came before rather than merely bolted onto it.

Tim McGraw did this in 2023 when he released Standing Room Only, and then near the end of the year released the six-song EP Poet’s Résumé. The album art shared the same color palette and photographic style, and stylistically hewed to the same late-stage McGraw blend of pop, country, and rock that he and his collaborators have landed on. Six songs. A real artistic statement. An expansion of the Standing Room Only world, not a dilution of it. He’s no longer the dominant radio force he once was, and his singles haven’t really landed the way they probably hoped, but McGraw has 7-8 million monthly listeners on Spotify, a real and solid listener base, and this EP served them well.

My personal favorite example, though, is a relatively under-the-radar Texas artist named Matt Castillo. His record How the River Flows is a genuinely fascinating record from 2022 — Texas country blended with the beautiful textures of Norteña and Tejano that come directly from Castillo’s life. It’s just wonderful. And then six to twelve months later, he released a follow-up EP entitled The River Continues, which took the ideas and vibes of that record and broadened the horizons Castillo was painting. Crucially, he kept them as two independent pieces of art that are connected but stand separately. When I saw that EP drop, I actually went back and listened to How the River Flows again. I’d almost forgotten it had come out. The EP aimed at reengaging his fanbase, succeeded perfectly, and it happened organically.

The album era is under real pressure. The format is faltering. But the answer isn’t to keep piling songs onto a finished record until it collapses under its own weight. There’s a model here that manages to serve both the commercial reality of streaming and the artistic integrity of what an album is supposed to be.

Make the record. Close the door on it properly. Then, when the time is right, open a new door next to it. No need to chisel at the foundation to build a rickety extension.

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Thanks for reading.

-Joe