When it comes to music, is less more?

For artists, this is a very pivotal question: whether to release lots of music, some of it being above exceptional, or release a small amount of music and have it all be exceptional.

For a larger artist with more music, some people might say they enjoy big catalogs. It allows them to have an experience with several different projects with a variety of songs. The bad songs help you enjoy the good ones even more.

One example of this kind of artist is Taylor Swift. Although most of her catalogue of over 270 songs is above exceptional, not all of them are perfect. This diversity helps the listener appreciate the better songs more.

The other side of the argument is quality over quantity. If an artist has a limited number of songs and they are all good, does it make up for the fact they only have a limited number of tracks?

Olivia Rodrigo definitely represents this metric. She has two studio albums with 12 and 11 songs each. This pales in comparison to Taylor Swift’s large discography, but the quality of each song is exceptional. There is not a single objectively bad song on either of her albums; in fact, they are all well above average. Even though her discography is small, the quality of the songs is not to be slept on.

In the end, it comes down to personal preference: quality or quantity.