In the vinyl era, when a single LP was about 40 minutes long, it was pretty normal for artists to release roughly an album a year. (e.g. Led Zeppelin's eight studio albums were released over a span of 10.5 years, but one was a double album and they took a long break when Robert Plant's son died. The first 7 albums were released over 7 years).
It seems like it was only when albums started to be recorded for the longer CD format (75 min or so) that the time between albums seemed to increase, as if artists felt they needed to have enough material to fill a substantial fraction of a CD's capacity before releasing.
Now that we're in the streaming era, there isn't any particular container size to "fill" to make an album, so there isn't any particular reason for bands to wait long periods, except for their own creative cycles. The notion of an "album" isn't really constrained by any physical limits anymore and it's really just "a bunch of songs released together".
I think the Ek's statements just reflect the fact that it's easier to be successful if you're prolific, and the the new model actually pays when people listen (roughly speaking), rather than just when they buy.
The idea behind creating an album, a collection of songs behind a theme or era of your creative life, lets you tell more of a story in a cohesive way. It lets you create more interconnected works, rather than one idea per song.
Also, it lets you take breaks and lets things breathe. It's really hard to take a song from creation to recording to mastering to releasing without giving yourself a break in the meantime.
Also also, batching out writing, recording, and post-prod makes it go much faster as well
In short, it's far far easier to make 12 songs in a year than one song in a month, and you'll get a much better product out of it.
Not all artists look at it from a purely business perspective. Spotify has the power to support artists, to build any feature they want, using data that no distribution platfo of the past has ever had, but instead they're narrowing the path to success; and justifying it with their own profit motive.
I honestly don't think the length of the albums matter. As bands get more successful, they tour more, and that eats up all of their time. Lots of bands will tour for 2 full years after an album release, and only then start to work on another.
Back in the 70's, bands just didn't casually tour the world like now.
Bands toured like crazy in the 70's. Led Zeppelin II was written and recorded on the road. (technically that was the 60s, tho)
I think you have the causality backwards. Because CDs were a longer format, they enabled bands to take longer tours before having to release another album.
To drag that back even further, albums were named that because 78s were generally held in albums (like photo albums).
78s were an A and a B side, they could be released as singles/one offs and generally weren't cohesive. Eventually you had people releasing related works or having longer recording sessions.
It sounds like a scenario of "What is old is new again", not that singles ever faded but all mediums outside of digital required the same amount of effort from the user for 1 track as it did for an album (put on an LP vs 45, cassettes had singles too but it's the same effort, CD changing would be difficult for a single song).
Because the amount of story that the creators want to tell requires more than 2 hours.
Shows with 50 or more episodes in the entire series may take years for the whole series to come out. But they never really try to go more than a year without releasing a batch of ~10 episodes.
In the vinyl era, when a single LP was about 40 minutes long, it was pretty normal for artists to release roughly an album a year. (e.g. Led Zeppelin's eight studio albums were released over a span of 10.5 years, but one was a double album and they took a long break when Robert Plant's son died. The first 7 albums were released over 7 years).
It seems like it was only when albums started to be recorded for the longer CD format (75 min or so) that the time between albums seemed to increase, as if artists felt they needed to have enough material to fill a substantial fraction of a CD's capacity before releasing.
Now that we're in the streaming era, there isn't any particular container size to "fill" to make an album, so there isn't any particular reason for bands to wait long periods, except for their own creative cycles. The notion of an "album" isn't really constrained by any physical limits anymore and it's really just "a bunch of songs released together".
I think the Ek's statements just reflect the fact that it's easier to be successful if you're prolific, and the the new model actually pays when people listen (roughly speaking), rather than just when they buy.
[edit: punctuation]