Humming beneath every announcement of an artist’s new project is the nebulous market timetable within which their creative process must fit. Artists that sidestep those limitations keep the dream of impulse and spontaneity alive. Over the past several decades, expectations related to how often artists should release new music have changed, affecting how they develop from fad throwaways to cultural institutions. “No one wants to be that person who had a really great six-month run,” says pop critic and University of Alabama associate professor Eric Weisbard. “But the question of how you get there is what makes pop music so interesting.”

Weisbard points to Frank Sinatra, with his trajectory from teen sensation to musical icon, as the archetype for all of the blockbuster pop stars that have followed. “Everyone, in a sense, wants to be Sinatra,” he says. When the singer first started out in the late 1930s and ’40s, artists who recorded albums were making statements about their longevity, and by extension, their cultural importance. Though he began his solo career in 1942 and quickly became a star, Sinatra didn’t release his first studio album, then a novel idea for a pop musician, until 1946. The Voice of Frank Sinatra, originally sold in a set of four, one-song-per-side 78 rpm records, lent him a new measure of authenticity. “The album simply exploded onto the American consciousness,” writes biographer James Kaplan, “fixing Sinatra’s reputation as not merely a crooner but a singer.”

Two years later, Columbia Records introduced 33⅓ longplay records, or LPs. Becoming the go-to format for adult-oriented genres like classical and jazz, they took on an association with more cultural permanence and higher taste; 45 rpm singles, introduced by RCA in 1949, featured shorter play times and lower retail prices, appealing to pop and rock acts with younger fanbases. “Over time, the LP was positioned as a kind of anti-novelty, even at times anti-modern and anti-mass, commodity,” writes media studies scholar Keir Keightly in an academic essay from 2004.

With their market-driven appeals to greater artistic permanence than here-now-gone-soon singles, LPs became a stabilizing force for record labels trying to remain profitable in the historically volatile industry. It didn’t take long for labels to start having all of their acts record albums—and lots of them. Twelve years after their introduction, LPs made up 80 percent of total record sales. In his 2004 book Breaking Records: 100 Years of Hits, music critic and historian William Ruhlmann notes that the rise of the album shifted artist release schedules from a new single every few weeks in the ’40s to two albums and a handful of singles per year in the ’50s and into the ’60s.

As teen-oriented pop and rock acts started to mature artistically and amass more gravitas, their new status was reflected in relatively longer gaps between releases. Thanks to a 1962 record deal intended to milk the Beach Boys for quick profit, the supposed fad band put out three studio albums per year on Capitol from 1963 to 1965. That pace slowed, however, with the 1966 release of Pet Sounds, which Brian Wilson famously wrote after quitting touring the year earlier, in an effort to break free of the band’s relentless performance and recording schedule. Despite lower sales than their previous albums, the highly orchestrated Pet Sounds distinguished Wilson and the group as musicians with a specific creative vision.

The Beatles followed a similar trajectory from an underestimated teen act to vanguards, releasing their first three studio albums over the course of a year and a half. In the U.S., Capitol milked the band’s UK content for all it was worth, clipping and repackaging those carefully-sequenced releases into five more ever-marketable (and redundant) patchwork albums the band detested. But it was only after 1967’s opus Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which also followed the band’s retirement from touring, that the Beatles solidified their place as critically-acclaimed legends. United with the loose theme of the foursome as a psychedelic military band, Sgt. Pepper’s emulated the continuity and grandiosity of the LP’s original, adult-oriented (and thus more “serious”) genres. Playing as one continuous song per side, it also marked the first time a U.S. Beatles album had the same track listing as its UK counterpart. “What you see for most of the next 50 years is this idea that albums are supposed to be conceptual,” says Powers. “They’re supposed to be artistic masterpieces—this achievement that takes a lot of investment.”