As artists such as Adele prove that patience is a virtue, maybe the wait for the songwriter’s sequel to Channel Orange is a positive sign of a more progressive music industry

Remember that strange hive-mind dream we all shared in the summer of 2012, in which a bandana-clad man with a lush, languid voice, sang about idle nights in America’s sunshine state? As Frank Ocean fans have joked on Twitter recently, the singer is beginning to feel like a figment of our collective imaginations after an almost-four-year wait for new music. His second album proper, rumoured to be titled Boys Don’t Cry, was slated for July, but never arrived. There was also another disappointment – a single, supposedly called White Ferrari, had been teased by his collaborators, while internet sleuths suggested it might be coming now. At the time of writing this blog, however, the track is yet to arrive. Maybe Frank was a fantasy after all.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Right now, over 70% of my focus is on apparel,’ said Kanye West. Photograph: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Is there a cause for celebration amid the frustration, however? There have been a number of massive names expected to release in 2015. Adele returned, but Kanye didn’t, his seventh full-length album, SWISH – originally slated for release in 2014, then provisionally called So Help Me God – is still apparently unfinished. Rihanna this year revealed two singles, an album title, an album sleeve and world tour dates for her new album Anti – everything but the actual album. We’re also now in the longest stretch of time between Radiohead records in the Oxford band’s career, with their ninth album – on many publications’ most anticipated albums of 2015 lists in January – pushed back by film score and solo project distractions.

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The fact these acts are no longer bowing to the music industry’s traditional factory-churn approach – between 2005 and 2012, Rihanna famously released an album a year (apart from 2008), a move one suspects was to do less with prolificness and more about label profits – could lead to artistically stronger albums, and a healthier industry.

Ocean’s last album, 2012’s Channel Orangesold more than half a million copies in the US and Canada, winning a Grammy for best urban contemporary album a year later. He became a reluctant household name and poster boy for modern sexual politics – before the album was released, a touching Tumblr post saw the 28-year-old reveal himself to be bisexual, helping break a huge taboo in rap and R&B music. His label, Island, will have been eager to issue a follow-up. But isn’t it better to let the former Odd Future member take his time on the album, and accumulate some more of the life experiences he mined on his last record?

A similar stance applies to Kanye. “Right now, over 70% of my focus is on apparel,” the rapper turned fashion mogul told Paper magazine in June. Fans continue to clamour for a followup to 2013’s Yeezus album, but as Pitchfork writer Jayson Green wrote in a piece titled “Kanye West is going to drop a brick and it’s going to hurt”: “Kanye cares less about this album than any other he’s ever made … For the first time, there seems to be no animating idea behind his next project, no mission statement. He seems in general more focused on the parts of his life – being a father, developing clothes, making motivational speeches – that don’t involve the arduous process of album-making.” The fact a Kanye album hasn’t turned up in 2015 is possibly a good thing.

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“I’m sure some people there would love a new Rihanna album every two weeks,” says music market analyst Tim Ingham, on the subject of pop singer’s label, Universal. The reality of the record industry’s present state of decline, currently collapsing in on itself like a dying star, is that as album sales continue to drop, more pressure is heaped on the few bankable artists to release more, and more regularly. Saturation often does more harm than good, both in terms of artists’ health and commercial appeal, however. “It’s the cruellest rule of the modern entertainment business. You have to kill yourself working to get noticed over Candy Crush and Call of Duty and Netflix but once you’ve achieved that recognition, woe betide if you’re in our faces too much,” Ingham adds.



You could argue Lady Gaga found this out the hard way, when her 2013 album Artpop sold nearly 100,000 fewer copies than expected in its first week. The album eventually sold more than 2.4m copies, but drastically underperformed compared with her previous records, leading to a website rant in which she angrily dismissed rumours that Interscope had lost more than $25m in production and promotion of the album. By the following year’s Cheek To Cheek duet album with Tony Bennett, she’d released six albums in six years, including two remix albums. Taylor Swift, meanwhile, has released an album every two years since her 2006 debut, scoring her biggest album last year with 1989 – but even she seems wary of the trend. “I think people might need a break from me,” Taylor Swift she told NME earlier this year, explaining plans to take a breather before its sequel.

It’s ironic that the one major artist who did return on timehas made the biggest case for giving these artists whose records never turned up time to breathe. Adele’s new album 25 sold a staggering 3.3m copies on its first week of release last month, more than four years after her last longplayer. That success, following a break from the public eye, will no doubt encourage the industry to shift towards allowing artists more time to complete an album. “Major label A&R execs aren’t impatient, unfeeling commerce addicts – as fun as it is to paint them that way,” says Ingham. “Their job is to ensure an artist creates a record that has the best possible chance of mainstream success.”

It increasingly looks as if the music industry is learning the benefits of patience. But there is a way to go. As Adele put it in an interview with Rolling Stone in November: “I’m just writing for Frank fucking Ocean to come out with his album, it’s taking so fucking long … come back!”