Mac DeMarco’s 523 minute album: The inadvertent death of art or its great liberator?
In 2023, lo-fi indie slacker Mac DeMarco put out an album of 199 songs. One Wayne G came in at 523 minutes long. At the time, it seemed novel. Now, it looks like a diegesis in the story of art.
This Record Store Day, the Far Out Magazine music team were tasked with assembling their £150 hauls. It became clear: you don’t get many records for £150 these days. This is a fact often overlooked in the bid to support artists.
This year’s Record Store Day ambassador, Sam Fender, said it himself: buying vinyl “is the best way of showing support for the artists that you like”. In an age where streaming revenue, or lack thereof, is so well broadcasted that it’s almost moot to mention the measly racket, the physical format remains the best for everyone.
However, as vinyl album prices eek ever closer to a £30 standard, purchasing anything beyond the odd collectable gatefold piece of treasured analogue loses all viability for most people. Traditionally, youngsters have always been the heartbeat of alternative culture, but amid a cost of living crisis, how many 20-year-olds can afford to support their heroes? A deplorable 30% of 14-24-year-olds in the UK are living in poverty. They have been priced out of supporting culture.
One Wayne G was a record never intended to be released on vinyl. At nearly nine hours long, how could it be? The costs involved would be astronomical—and they wouldn’t be worth it. DeMarco would be the first to admit that this wasn’t his most sweated-over album. In fact, it’s not really an album at all—it’s an invite into an artist’s archive.
In essence, the album poses the question: in the digital age of a content avalanche, why hold anything back? If an artist is spending hours and hours creating things in a world that is steadily moving away from costly finite vinyl and heading toward the infinite expanse of data, what is the point of still adhering to the old method of analogue releases?
With vinyl, it makes sense to pare back and perfect—someone has paid good money for a disc that they want to listen to in its entirety. The same rules don’t apply when it comes to streaming. The consumer has paid to access as much as possible, and if anything pops up that they don’t like amid this infinite onslaught, they simply hit skip.
So, One Wayne G makes perfect sense on all counts—fans get more of their favourite artist, DeMarco racks up more streaming revenue for work that would otherwise have never been heard, and the whole experiment might just liberate the creativity of musicians and bring about a new age of music production that more closely matches our spiralling music consumption.
However, it is equally possible releases like One Wayne G play into passive listening habits that harm artists. For instance, imagine you’re 400 minutes into the album, and you’ve got it on in the background while you study: would you notice if Spotify seamlessly inserted a little six-minute AI segment in the same ambient vein as what had preceded it? Would you care all that much if a two-hour chunk of it was killed off in a bid to make the app ‘more streamlined’? You wouldn’t. Or at least you haven’t, because both of those things are already increasingly commonplace, and no action is being taken against them.
So, the landscape has become one defined by contradictions that could be surmised as thus: the format that used to preserve art and drive consumer participation now excludes it, and the format that made an infinity of art affordable now threatens to make it obsolete.
