From what I understand, they record a load of songs and release them periodically, but I’m not sure if I’m 100% right
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Could be a variety of reasons, as simple as an artist not happy with the current recordings of a song, or just waiting for an appropriate album for the song to fit into, or still incomplete at that time (such as vocals recorded, but instrumental backing still missing)
The estate may choose to release those songs even when the artist hadn’t felt like releasing them when they were still alive.
Every musician that has released a record or two usually have multiple songs recorded but are not chosen to be included on the records. After they die if they have a will the person they will the rights to the songs can choose to have those unchosen songs released as a new album to collect money on.
Often, its form projects they were working on while alive, yes.
generally, artists work on a lot more music than what gets released to the public. Some songs are just not quite good enough, others are colabs that fell through, etc, etc. After their death, other artists often use these “rejects” as inspiration or sample them, and credit the dead artist as both a form of tribute and a marketing ploy (as an artists music tends to gain a popularity boost when they die, which can be exploited).
There are a few main ways that this happens, and it can vary from project to project and artist to artist.
The first way, though this isn’t really what you’re asking about and is pretty obvious, is when an artist has a finished album with a planned release date and they unfortunately die before it comes out. An example of this is Life After Death by Biggie Smalls, which was finished in January of 1997 and set to be released in late March of 1997, but Biggie was murdered a few weeks before that date.
The second is that you have a recording that was previously unknown. For example in 1965 John Coltrane performed A Love Supreme live in Seattle, and saxophone player Joe Brazil recorded the concert. Brazil kept the tapes in his own personal collection. After Brazil died a friend was going through his stuff and realized what they were. Prior to this there had only been one known live recording of A Love Supreme, so eventually they were released. The material didn’t come out during his life because nobody knew it existed.
The third way is that there is a part of a track or an outtake that gets turned into a full one. For example after Phil Lynott from Thin Lizzy died the surviving band members took vocals from a demo called [Dedication](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkktlPHFqjo) and recorded a song around those vocals. Phil Lynott recorded those vocals (and possibly the bass part), but the guitar and drums and everything else was written after his death. Another example of this is Born Again by Biggie Smalls, which took verses he had written and recorded earlier in his career and put them together to make new songs.
The fourth way, which is similar to the third, is that an artist has recorded something in a complete format, meaning they actually finished the song and kept it in their own collection for some reason, as opposed to it just being a part of a song like Dedication or Born Again. This can range from a demo that was never fully finished to a song that was cut from an album to full mixed and mastered albums of material. For example some estimates say that Prince’s vault at Paisley Park contains as many as *8,000* unreleased songs.
Songwriting and recording is a multi-stage process. It’s not uncommon for a professional musician to have recorded some incomplete songs that just need some studio polish to be ready for an album.
Similarly, famous singers who have backup instrumentation that isn’t a consistent band (think pop stars – there are other instruments, but it isn’t like a traditional rock band where every member is part of the whole, even if one member is the “frontman”) will record vocal tracks solo in a home studio while working on it. In a lot of cases these are good enough in quality to have a band put music behind it and be commercially viable, and unfortunately due to the nature of how artists’ deaths are handled, a lot of time a song that probably *wouldn’t* work when the artist was alive might go platinum on a memorial album of unreleased tracks.
Some artists also write and record a lot more than they put out. I remember hearing a story from Kevin Smith about Prince where he recorded a documentary for Prince that never saw the light of day, and it was revealed to him that Prince basically had an entire “vault” of unreleased songs, films, and other projects that for whatever reason weren’t up to his standards while he was alive. Depending on how his surviving family chose to handle that, some of that may have been published after his death.
It’s because the speed of sound is slower than the speed of light. They’ve died, but the sounds they made while living haven’t reached our ears yet.
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