Who Gets to Be An “Album Artist” In a Single Artist’s World?

Jimmy Page hates singles. He said so in Becoming Led Zeppelin, explaining how he believed they could break “the spirit of bands,” and that he made it a point for Led Zeppelin to be an “albums band.” He wanted radio stations to play whole sides of their LPs rather than just one song, in an attempt to reject the industry’s reliance on bite-sized teasers for commercial traction. Even so, I’d guess a good chunk of this century’s gen-pop probably knows Zeppelin exclusively from “Stairway to Heaven,” or “Whole Lotta Love,” or “Immigrant Song.” Page framed it like a hard line—singles versus albums—but in reality, that line has always shifted, depending on how artists, industries, and listeners alike collide.

Tate McRae’s recent third album, So Close To What, came out a few weeks after I saw Becoming Led Zeppelin in theaters. She’s one of the clearest examples of an artist reaping the benefits of the algorithm: snippets from 2023’s “greedy” caught traction on TikTok before the song ever fully dropped, directly translating to Billboard Hot 100 entries and high chart peaks. (The official audio has been used in 1.8 million videos at the time of this writing.) By the time I reached “Sports car” on my first listen through So Close To What, I had Page’s words ringing in my head. Undeniable tracks like “Revolving door” and “2 hands,” even if unintentionally, cast songs like “Like i do” and “No i’m not in love” as filler by comparison. It crystallized the belief I’d already held subconsciously: Tate McRae is a “singles artist,” or at least positioned as one for now. She thrives on one-offs over complete works, embracing industry pressures and ever-shortening attention spans in preference for quick hits and flashing virality. That doesn’t necessarily reflect her ability to make an album so much as it does the way today’s ecosystem rewards singles over complete works.

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This isn’t new—singles have always been the most efficient way to break through. What’s changed is the machine surrounding them, the way a viral TikTok, random playlist add, or dragged-out rollout can crown or flatten an artist before the album even arrives. Apps like TikTok and Spotify have become the end-all-be-all of general music discovery, as their algorithm-based suggestions flatten the listening pool into a one-size-fits-all box. Singles are the easiest entry points because of the inherent infrastructure through which people are getting their music. Why parse through a full LP when your streaming service has already told you which songs from it to play and rewarded you for doing so?

Albums were the secondary market to singles in the fifties and sixties, causing everyone from Elvis to the Ronettes to release albums padded with filler, cover-song fodder, and a few charting singles. Their careers were reliant on 45s getting radio airplay to amplify sales. The same logic resurfaced in the seventies, when the careers of groups like Ace and T. Rex were overtaken by a few lone singles (“How Long” and “Get It On,” respectively). The iTunes-era brought singles into the aughts pop scene, launching the careers of Pitbull, OneRepublic, Imagine Dragons, Bruno Mars, and even early Adele. EDM subgenres (disco-funk, progressive house) have remained relatively single-oriented into the 2020s, with acts like RÜFÜS DU SOL, ODESZA, or Lane 8 among a rare few who prioritize albums. Each of these shifts shows how the single versus album divide has always been shaped by format (the 45 RPM disc, the LP, the CD, the MP3 download, the stream), and defined, in part, by the listener—making it more of a negotiation than a fixed identity.

I’m often most frustrated by singles when the rest of the album that follows is underwhelming by comparison. The hope is that the singles are either made better by, or contextualized within, the rest of the music that surrounds them. This inspired me to think about the “single artists” versus “album artists” argument more generally, which inevitably took me down a completely different rabbit hole of Reddit debates and archived mid-2000s discussion posts. The labels/categories are relatively self-explanatory, but they’re not permanent. It can be decided on a project-by-project basis, a natural progression of one’s artistry, or a fall from grace. Many, if not most artists today meander between the two. Dua Lipa, for example, became an albums artist with Future Nostalgia, but reverted to a singles artist on Radical Optimism. Rihanna’s ANTI ushered her into the albums artist category after over a decade as a singles artist. The Beatles transitioned into albums artists—if not completely, then partially—due to their reduced reliance on radio airplay and absence from touring in the post-Beatlemania part of their career. Drake has been a singles artist since Views, with the quadfecta of “Hotline Bling,” “One Dance,” “Controlla,” and “Childs Play” influencing the sequencing in 2016 and rollout of his albums since.

A singles artist is not to be confused with a one-hit wonder. “Espresso” lives in an entirely different category from, say, Iyaz’s “Replay” (Remember him? I didn’t either). A one-hit wonder is about appearance and disappearance, never getting far enough past the first breakthrough to achieve long-term relevancy. A singles artist, on the other hand, can build an entire career on strong individual tracks, even if their albums don’t fully cohere. That distinction matters because it shows that being a “singles artist” isn’t about talent or consistency, but about how the industry and audience value those songs. Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet fell into the pretty-good-singles-but-underwhelming-tracklist category. For her new album, Man’s Best Friend, she reversed it, holding almost everything back except “Manchild.” It’s a small but telling move: a wager that the album will matter as a complete work, not just as a string of viral moments.

Even without a steady singles drop, Carpenter held the public over as they awaited Man’s Best Friend. Aside from her original (and best) album cover causing a post-feminism frenzy across all existing social media platforms, she went on to drop a redundant slew of alternates, simultaneously promoting more chatter while also backing down from her initial artistic statement. And we can’t talk about Carpenter’s new penchant for album variants and not look at Taylor Swift, an artist who has capitalized on the business of album promotion so much that no one would ever even think about calling her a singles artist anymore. She’s made album releases such a spectacle that she hasn’t dropped a pre-album single since 2019. There were no singles for Midnights or The Tortured Poets Department until release day (and she had to go with the Post Malone feature of all tracks?), and she’s being similarly skimpy with The Life of a Showgirl this week. Instead, the entire Swiftian money-making machine operates solely on the buzz from the announcement alone. Thousands of fans drop hundreds of dollars on a litany of cover variants and special editions (The Life of a Showgirl has six different CDs and seven vinyl variants, each unique both in disc color and the cover art). Olivia Rodrigo took a similar, albeit less extreme, approach with the GUTS physical releases, offering four different vinyls, each with its own surprise single not available on streaming (Lady Gaga also did this with the Target edition of MAYHEM, which included one bonus track and one alternate cover).

Someone like Justin Bieber, meanwhile, has almost always been a singles artist with an album artist’s ambition. One of his recent surprise releases, Swag, made that clear. Inevitably, only a choice few from the tracklist really had a lasting impact. It was a big swing online, with semi-viral payoff in tracks like “DAISIES” and “YUKON,” but not much else. The gap between his intention and the scattershot execution is what makes him such a useful example. His career shows how vision alone doesn’t define whether you’re a singles or albums artist.

Surprise releases are one of the biggest “I’m an album artist” statements a musician can make. In the past year alone, alongside Bieber, we’ve had surprise (or subtly advertised) drops from Earl Sweatshirt (Live Laugh Love), Tyler, the Creator (DON’T TAP THE GLASS), and Kendrick Lamar (GNX). Leading with the album and nothing else is a powerful declaration of one’s confidence in their own artistry and audience. It’s also a refusal to play by the singles-first game—an insistence that the whole is greater than its algorithmic parts. And surprise drops only work because listeners—fandoms, even—still crave the myth of a cohesive statement, even in a singles-first world.

Kendrick Lamar is the rare artist whose work is difficult to pin down. In the first half of 2024, he released three culture-shaping singles—“meet the grahams,” “euphoria,” and, most famously, “Not Like Us”—during the zenith of his beef with Drake. Each dropped on YouTube or Instagram before hitting streaming platforms, and “Not Like Us” went on to earn him five Grammys, including Song of the Year and Record of the Year. GNX came months later without warning or much fanfare, yet it was met with near-universal critical acclaim. This is in the same spirit as his career-spanning “The Heart” series, for which he precedes his album drops with surprise one-off tracks. “heart pt. 6,” the most recent, is the first to exist solely within an album rather than as a standalone single. “The Heart Pt. 3” isn’t on good kid, m.A.A.d city, but “The Heart Part Five” is on Mr. Morale and & The Big Steppers as a “digital bonus track.” He doesn’t stick to one set formula, and instead goes about his releases with more fluidity and intuition. Kendrick’s treatment of singles as seismic events is an outlier now, and few of his peers can illustrate cohesion as an art-form.

The least common trope is when artists are forced into the singles-artist box but manage to escape. That tension often shows itself as an unexpected triumph, when an artist overemphasizes singles, only for the full album to land harder than anyone expected. Addison Rae’s debut record rollout, for instance, looked like a textbook singles-artist move: five songs stretched across ten months, almost half of a 12-track album teased out before release day. The assumption was that the rest of her debut would be filler, but Addison, which displayed Rae’s range, upended what the singles economy had previously afforded her. British singer-songwriter RAYE felt an even sharper version of this push and pull. For years, her label boxed her into the dance-feature market, pigeonholing her as a playlist artist. When she broke free and self-released her debut LP, My 21st Century Blues, she shifted herself into albums-artist territory almost overnight, not because her writing changed, but because she finally had control over how that writing was framed and consumed.

The present-day landscape is, for the most part, working against the albums artists. The expectation of hyper-segmented, algorithmic promo periods, teasers, Easter eggs, and content trails breaks albums into parts rather than prioritizing their fullness. Most artists are perpetually somewhere in the middle, caught in the ongoing negotiation between their own ambitions, the industry’s demands, and the way listeners consume their work. The singles versus albums artist divide isn’t a clean binary, but rather a spectrum shaped by intention, industry, and audience. Led Zeppelin wanted whole sides on the radio; Tate McRae gets algorithm-optimized singles; Addison Rae, RAYE, and Kendrick Lamar illustrate what happens when artists either lean into or push back against the framing that’s expected of them and their genres. What the distinction ultimately reveals isn’t just who makes good albums or good singles, but how artists negotiate with the systems around them, and how we, as listeners, choose to engage with that. Maybe the question isn’t whether someone is a “singles artist” or an “albums artist” at all, but whether their work can outlast the format it’s funneled through.

Who Gets to Be An “Album Artist” In a Single Artist’s World?

From classic rock to TikTok, the line between singles and albums is constantly being redrawn, shaped as much by the industry and platforms as by the artists and listeners themselves.