Quality Vs Quantity: Which Is More Important In Your Art?

The other day on Tiktok we were talking about how few artists ever post more than 10 songs on Spotify. The VAST majority stop before 10, so we were encouraging our listeners to set a quantity goal: post ten songs and you'll already be ahead of the vast majority. Someone commented on that post and said, "But how does quality vs. quantity come into play here?"

We thought that was such a good question that we decided to dedicate a whole episode to answering it.

We obviously have an opinion on which matters most, but what's yours?

The parable we quoted in this podcast:

From David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book, ⁠Art & Fear⁠:

[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

Listen to this month's song ⁠Ultraconditional⁠ on our page.