When vinyl copies of Lil Wayne's Tha Carter VI — the latest entry in the rapper's vaunted Tha Carter series — went up for online preorder earlier this year, Alexis Collins was ready. The 27-year-old technical support engineer, who lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and describes herself as a longtime Wayne fan, says she ponied up for the purple color-variant vinyl, which goes for about $38, plus a couple of bucks in sales tax and more than $10 for shipping. Upon receiving her order, though, Collins noticed something odd: Unlike the other Lil Wayne vinyl albums in her collection, the record's packaging didn't include a tracklist to show what songs were on side A or side B. Matters got worse when she started listening.
"The vinyl itself has a nice sound to it, but I don't believe it has the best songs from the album on it," she says. "The album," in her wording, refers to the digital version of Tha Carter VI that appeared on streaming services in early June, which features 19 tracks in total. The vinyl version, Collins discovered, includes only nine — and of those, three are bonus tracks exclusive to physical formats. Which means that in the end, only six songs on her $38 purchase overlap with the "official" version that most listeners streamed online for close to free, and those that made the cut are a mixed bag. "It has some of the more skipped songs," Collins says, noting that only two of the LP's tracks are among those she's saved to her Spotify library.
Vinyl posted its 18th straight year of sales growth last year, as U.S. record industry revenue of $1.4 billion from the LP format marked its highest on an inflation-adjusted basis since 1988. Yet stories like Collins' seem unusually common lately. Early physical copies of Beyoncé's 2024 release Cowboy Carter were missing half a dozen songs from the digital release. The Weeknd's 2025 swan song Hurry Up Tomorrow, on its first vinyl pressing, contained just 11 tracks compared to the digital version's 22. It's not unusual for tracklists to vary somewhat across formats, but in a cultural moment when vinyl matters again and yet streaming rules all, something feels different. This kind of major discrepancy between the physical and digital tracklists of prominent albums may be a new normal, at least for artists mercurial enough to continue tinkering with their music until the last possible minute.
Physical limits
Like any physical media format, vinyl carries inherent space restrictions. "You have about 22 to 25 minutes per side at 33 ⅓ RPM that you can fit," says Cam Sarrett, head of sales and marketing at the Nashville-based United Record Pressing, which has been pressing vinyl for more than 75 years for artists including Taylor Swift, Michael Jackson, Dolly Parton, Adele and Stevie Wonder. Going longer is possible, but not without a noticeable downgrade in sound quality. "The format has its limitations," Sarrett says, "which is either a bothersome thing or a beautiful thing, depending on how you look at it."
For an album like Tha Carter VI, whose full tracklist runs an hour and seven minutes, some cuts would be inevitable to fit things on a single LP. Expanding to a double-disc set can be an option, assuming the label's contractual agreement deems it worth the additional costs. However, in the case of these recent high-profile releases, vinyl's limitations don't appear to be the only issue: The CD editions of the latest Lil Wayne, Beyoncé and Weeknd albums also featured those abbreviated tracklists, despite the fact that CDs can generally hold up to 74 minutes of music.
A bigger factor may be the release timelines of these albums. According to Billy Fields, who leads commercial vinyl strategy at Warner Music Group, artists, managers and labels have been aggressive in setting dates for big records in recent years, often claiming space on the release calendar before the music and artwork have even been turned in. "We're all trying to eat the cake before it's baked, essentially," Fields says. (Perhaps literally, in some cases: When Tha Carter V finally arrived after multiple delays in 2018, the release date was timed to coincide with Wayne's birthday. This year, a June 6 release — 6/6 — was likewise an auspicious one for Tha Carter VI.)
Those artificially imposed deadlines don't always mix well with vinyl production, which despite the format's streaming-age resurgence is still inherently a time-consuming industrial process. In 2025, as in 1955 or 1985, each individual copy of a vinyl record takes about 30 seconds to make, according to Fields. The typical time frame to get a brand-new vinyl album produced from start to finish — that is, from when the final music is submitted to when the records are delivered to a warehouse — is probably going to be from 10 to 12 weeks, including listening to and approving a test pressing, he says. Manufacturing CDs can be faster, but it's still not an overnight task to get them in stores.
Changing expectations
The problem may be that artists, like fans, have grown used to the near-instantaneous nature of digital distribution. On the streaming side, recent albums have sometimes been sent to digital platforms on the Wednesday before their Friday release, while single tracks have occasionally been delivered within 24 hours of needing to go live, Fields says. "It's no longer, 'This is when you turn it in, and this is when we kick off the album,'" he explains. "It's so much faster. It's so much shorter now than it's ever been." Music is on demand for listeners; it makes sense that artists might increasingly see it that way too, as an ongoing process centered around an album's arrival on streaming services rather than an abstract-feeling manufacturing deadline.
It's worth noting that both the Lil Wayne and Weeknd albums were distributed by Republic Records, a division of the major label Universal Music Group, while Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter was issued through Columbia Records, a subsidiary of the major label Sony Music Group. While similar time constraints apply to indie acts, blockbuster artists with aspirations for a No. 1 album may have a particular incentive to move as many units as possible — including streams, downloads and physical sales, all of which contribute to the same total — in the first week, even if that means starting production on physical records before all the music is ready. "Part of it is likely a chart game," speculates Fields, whose employer is the other "Big Three" major label.
And as far as the charts are concerned, a physical product that represents a fraction of the complete work can be just as valid, thanks to Billboard's liberal definition of an album. "The minimum number of songs required to be considered an album is four, no matter if it's digital or physical," says Keith Caulfield, managing director of charts and data operations at Billboard, in an email. Caulfield shared an Apple Music link with me pointing to a release titled Tha Carter VI - EP, which consisted of the six songs — clocking in at a scant 18 minutes — overlapping between the physical and digital forms of Tha Carter VI. "Wayne had a base six-song version of the album that the other iterations were built from," Caulfield says.
Despite the many articles and reviews that tend to accompany a new album from a multiplatinum, Grammy-winning artist like Wayne, the phrase "Tha Carter VI - EP" scarcely appeared in Google search results prior to this article. Exactly why the EP version wasn't publicized is unclear. Spokespeople for Lil Wayne, Beyoncé and The Weeknd didn't respond to requests for comment. Michal Štěrba, CEO of the vinyl manufacturer GZ Media — which pressed Tha Carter VI, according to information posted on the resale site Discogs — likewise didn't respond to requests for comment, and emails to the company's general contact address weren't returned.
Fields says that while the intentions of Lil Wayne, his management and his label were probably good — to give fans the music in all the formats they like, based on the tracks that were done in time — had it been his release, he would have stated up front that the vinyl was incomplete. "I would do it differently," Fields says. "I would say, 'This is a pre-order. This is going to be some version of the record, some sample of the record,' right? 'It's not going to be the full thing. There's going to be some stuff you've not heard.' I would at least tell fans this isn't going to be the full 19 tracks."
Indeed, the early CD and vinyl copies of Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter and the Weeknd's Hurry Up Tomorrow were billed as "one time" or "first" pressings, respectively — and while those artists' online stores didn't initially display a tracklist for physical editions of those albums, both do so now. Both artists have also since released updated physical packages, which contain the same tracklists as the digital versions of the albums (although Cowboy Carter's entirety remains curiously unavailable on CD). Meanwhile, as of press time, Tha Carter VI is the only vinyl record for sale in Wayne's online store without a tracklist shown. Amazon reviews are full of people saying they didn't know they were getting less than half the album.
What listeners want
The precise definition of an album has spent much of the 21st century in flux. Today's pop records arrive with mandatory deluxe editions, piling on extra tracks that arguably dilute the overall vision. The only CD version of Lorde's 2025 album Virgin currently available is on a clear disc that many CD players can't read. Swedish singer Jens Lekman revised two beloved early albums in 2022, after sample-clearance issues forced them off of streaming platforms. Kanye West famously tweeted that he was going to "fix" the song "Wolves" on the same day in 2016 that his album The Life of Pablo had already been released on the streaming service Tidal. Even my own original vinyl copy of Lil Wayne's 2008 opus Tha Carter III consists of just eight songs inexplicably spread across two 12-inch, 33-rpm vinyl LPs, compared with 16 songs on the CD version. (At least it has a tracklist, though.)
As listeners, we may have entered a time when multiple versions of a release feel inevitable, and it's harder to point to a single one as definitive. Pioneering British musician Brian Eno, writing in a 1995 diary entry, once entertained a vision of 21st-century album releases that may still resonate today: "Imagine if you could release a record in a million randomly different forms (or just four!)," he wrote. "Then imagine that, after first release, those are deleted. Anyone wanting the record thereafter specifies which version she wants, and is then given a random variant of that. But there has to be some feedback regarding which properties of the chosen version led to the choice." In the current digital smorgasbord, fans may tolerate some cavalier or even bait-and-switch tactics from artists and labels, as long as they have the agency to hear all the options once the dust settles.
For Alexis Collins, despite her disappointment with her vinyl purchase, her overall feedback for Lil Wayne's team seems to be to stay the course: "Just keep doing what you're doing," she says. She does recommend more guest appearances from newer rap artists, singling out the example on Tha Carter VI of BigXthaPlug ("He's got a growing fan base," she says of the Texas rapper) as more enticing than its better-known featured performers, such as U2's Bono. But when Lil Wayne plays at Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, on August 14, Collins plans to be there. "If other artists were to do something like this, I don't think they'd be able to get away with it," she says. "But I'm still a Lil Wayne fan. He can't win every time."
Copyright 2025 NPR