The blog post wasn't just a list of the types of media and entertainment he had been consuming. The proliferation of mixtapes, EP or album packages, one-off trend-chasing singles, and bonus tracks means musicians have to maintain their audiences by consistently remaining in the public eye. It can be consumed in concerts or at festivals and continuously through streaming services. We're no longer reliant on radio stations, MTV, and album drops for new music. Because music can be consumed and discarded so easily, we now expect our favorite artists to release songs based on our own personal desires. Now, modern music consumption has allowed us to skew the realities of the creation process. We respected these gaps as necessary to the creative process-partly because we didn't have a choice. In the naughts, we counted five years between Erykah Badu's Worldwide Underground and New Amerykah Part One. And D'Angelo, whose critically acclaimed album Black Messiah dropped in late 2014, took 14 years between albums. Before 2009, he had not released an album in eight years. Maxwell's latest release, blackSUMMERS'night, dropped seven years after his 2009 album BLACKsummers'night.

With other R&B artists, a long wait between albums is par for the course. But this four-year interval hardly deviates from the norm.

Frank ocean albums and mixtapes