With all the fuss about Justin Bieber in the pop press the last few months, you’d think someone would have noticed what for me is the most interesting, and possibly the most important, aspect of Bieber’s “career”: the incredible rapidity with which he’s been releasing material. His first single came out last July, but that was just a testing of the waters. The real flood started in October. Since then, in a space of less than six months, Bieber has released seven singles, an EP, and an album. That’s an average of a record every three weeks, a pace you’d need to go back to the glory years of James Brown in the mid-sixties to match (and Brown released his records under different names). Either that or back to the 1940s, when there was no such things as LPs, and singles were the only way people could purchase music.
Albums are still a big deal, of course (Bieber’s first LP will probably debut at number one next week), but for the younger audience singles are what really matter, and the ravenous horde of Bieber fans needs to be constantly fed. No doubt this will lead to total burn out, both on Bieber’s and his fans’ part, in less than a year, but in the meantime the old record release paradigm (which was only a couple of years old, anyway) will have been blown wide open. It will be interesting to see how long Bieber waits to release his next non-LP single. I’d be very surprised if it’s more than two months. It will be even more interesting to see who follows Bieber’s path.
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