Photo Credit: Dan Garcia / Greg Noire

With music moving at incredible speeds, the existence of troves of unreleased music seems both exciting and impossible. Yet, as producer TM88 pointed out in an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music's Beats 1, he is sitting on a mountain of unreleased collaborations with Travis Scott and Young Thug that will never see the light of day.

Why? They’ve both moved on as artists.

“We have a lot of songs with Travis and Young Thug on the same song,” he said. “But it's from an era where they kind of was like, doing tours together and stuff. And you know the way Trav works; he'll do a whole bunch of songs and be all into it at the time, and then nine months later, he's recording a whole new type of vibe. So I feel like if those songs would have came out, it would have changed the whole game, like, the whole rap game. 'Cause it was different. You had Trav with the weird Trav-kind-of-type-vibe and you had Thug that was just Thug.”

As inventive as Travis Scott and Young Thug are, their rate of innovation clearly has its downsides. As Scott and Thugger continue to grow into artists we love, we have to say goodbye to some of their previous efforts. Though some of ASTROWORLD was cooked up over the span of years, the album has a cohesive sound that likely does not match the of-the-moment creative highs on which TM88 caught Scott and Thugger.

A shame, but in an era where presentation and creative direction matter more than ever, wanting to preserve your artistic appearance over wanting to feed ravenous fans is understood and admirable. Travis Scott and Young Thug could give fans what they want, or they could stay true to their approaches and deliver music that is the best representation of their creative headspaces. The latter, of course, will always beat out the former in terms of genuineness.