Frank Ocean’s spontaneous release of his visual album “Endless” on iTunes on Friday was met with great excitement and acclaim by fans, making him one of only a handful of artists brave enough to make such a ballsy move.
Radiohead was the first band to popularize the art of impromptu album drops in 2007 with “In Rainbows” and with their two succeeding LPs.
It’s more than obvious that Beyoncé used this marketing tactic for her 2013 self-titled release, which remains to this day one of the most popular records of her career.
David Bowie, D’Angelo, J. Cole and Björk have all also had great success.
It’s become more popular recently, too. In 2016 alone, Radiohead, Beyoncé, Kanye West, Drake and Chance the Rapper have hopped on the surprise express.
All of these aforementioned have been highly successful. So you have to ask yourself why this has only really entered into the scene less than a decade ago.
Well, there’s a little bit more to it than that. After all, there’s always the chance fans may respond with backlash, and album sales could suffer.
Just look at how much hate U2 got for releasing their 2013 album “Songs on Innocence” by downloading it for free on every Apple device in the world, without permission.
This is, of course, a highly doubtful scenario for mainstream artists because their fans will pretty much buy anything. It’s still a legitimate enough fear though to make sudden albums so scarce.
Therefore, understandably, not every artist is comfortable with releasing new content out of the blue. In fact, it seems like for every surprise album group, there’s an equal amount of artists lagging behind much-overdue records.
In the rock world, delayed albums are a severely frustrating problem. Perhaps the most despised example would be the sixth Guns ‘N Roses album “Chinese Democracy,” a record that literally took an entire decade to record.
Those 10 years didn’t really pay off when the final product received generally mixed reviews from critics, which ranged from it being one of the band’s best records to it being one of the worst things in rock ‘n’ roll history.
Artists like Daft Punk, Blondie, the Stooges, Aerosmith and Morrissey have also been known to mercilessly torture their fans with the overwhelming dread of prolonged expectation.
In the long run, there’s no doubt this is a worse marketing strategy for artists than the sudden album drop. Leaving your fans hanging in a void for years on end to what could end up being nothing could result in them to give up and possibly not buy the record once it is released.
If an artist or band plans on using either of these tactics, instead of sticking to the standard rules of album releasing, then they need to know how to play the game.
The secret to success in either scenario is a massive and exceptionally active fanbase. Major mainstream artists like Lady Gaga or Jay-Z would be able to get away with this, but it would be career suicide for lesser-knowns.
The giant artists all know this, and we have definitely not heard the last from them. Spontaneous albums are the future of music marketing, and delays are just leeches with bottomless stomachs.
