Surprise album

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Surprise release
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A surprise album or surprise release is an album or single with little or no prior announcement, marketing or promotion.[1] The strategy contrasts traditional album releases, which typically feature weeks or months of advertising in the form of singles, music videos, tour announcements and album pre-sales. Often, the release of a surprise album is the formal announcement of its release. This strategy developed in part due to the prevalence of album leaks on the Internet during the 2000s and became popular by the mid-2010s among high-profile recording acts.

History

Precursors

Radiohead on tour for their 2007 surprise album In Rainbows

English musician David Bowie's studio album Toy, intended for release in March 2001, was originally conceived with the intention of being recorded and released as quickly as possible, foregoing traditional promotional cycles in the process. While the album was ultimately shelved, not seeing an official release until 2021, the concept was regarded by analysts as an early precursor to the surprise album model.[2]

The English rock band Radiohead's 2007 studio album In Rainbows is often credited as the first surprise album.[3][1][4][5] The release was announced on the band's blog ten days prior, which DIY magazine describes as "a pretty unexpected move" at the time.[1] Shortly after the release, Radiohead's bassist Colin Greenwood stated the band had several motivations behind the album's release format, including the increased popularity of the internet as a tool for discovering music, frustrations with the traditional release and promotion format, the freedom of not being signed to a record label at the time, a desire to do something special and unique, and an interest in broadcasting their music directly to listeners globally at the same time.[6] It also served as a countermeasure to Internet leaks of albums, which had become prevalent at the time.[1] In Rainbows is also credited for starting the pay-what-you-want model.[5]

After ending a tumultuous relationship with Interscope Records in 2007, Nine Inch Nails independently released Ghosts I–IV and The Slip in 2008. Both were released for free (with the option to purchase higher-quality digital or physical editions) and were released under a Creative Commons license to allow fans the ability to edit and remix the new music as they desired.[7] Nine Inch Nails manager Jim Guerinot said the idea to release the albums without prior announcement was to pre-empt a leak and control the marketing, stating: "Internet searches peak around the leak, not around the single or the album. By the time the album comes out, it's done."[8]

In 2011, American rappers Jay-Z and Kanye West advertised false release dates for their collaborative album Watch the Throne, in part an effort to pre-empt leaks. This strategy inspired the singer Frank Ocean to surprise-release his first album Channel Orange one week earlier than its publicized release date.[9]

Popularization

Between 2011 and 2012, David Bowie recorded

UK Singles Chart, becoming Bowie's highest-charting single since 1985's "Absolute Beginners".[15] Upon release in March 2013, The Next Day debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart and number two on the US Billboard 200.[16][17]

Beyoncé's self-titled studio album (2013) is often credited with popularizing surprise albums.

Lemonade in 2016. Jay-Z surprise released his 2017 album 4:44, and the following year the couple surprise released the collaborative album Everything Is Love as The Carters.[1]

By the mid-2010s, the music industry had entered what Zoladz called the "surprise-album era". While Beyoncé's name became synonymous with surprise albums, subsequent acts used the strategy in different ways. For instance, certain artists unexpectedly released an album, or a selection of tracks, that had been announced at an earlier date in an effort to outpace Internet leaks, as in 2015 with

Madonna's Rebel Heart, and Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly.[23]

Further examples

U2 performing at the Apple product launch at which Songs of Innocence was surprise announced in September 2014

Some surprise albums created controversy. In 2014, Irish rock band

Consequence of Sound noted that "U2 and Apple deserve credit for thinking ambitiously, but they overestimated the band's relevance with fans, and many felt like the automatic download constituted an invasion of privacy."[5]

In 2016, American R&B singer

Def Jam, and quickly followed up with Blonde the next day independently, both as Apple Music exclusives. The act of Frank Ocean leaving Def Jam called into question surprise albums and exclusive digital releases. An anonymous Def Jam employee said to Buzzfeed at the time, "Our view is that giving exclusives to individual streaming platforms for long periods of time is not good for the artist, it's not good for the fans, and it limits the commercial opportunity for everybody involved."[25] By 2019, Vulture and The Music Network published editorial articles questioning if the surprise album release format had peaked in popularity and effectiveness.[4][22]

In 2018, American rapper Eminem released his tenth studio album Kamikaze without any promotion or pre-announcement following the polarizing reaction of his previous 2017 album Revival, making it his second full-length studio album in 8 months. In a four-part video interview series with Sway Calloway, he laid out the reason for releasing the album this way. "When you go into an album, you can go into anything with the mindset of, 'This is gonna suck.' I feel like giving them no warning was the best thing to do. When the Revival track list came down the pipe, it was like overwhelmingly, 'This shit is going to be trash.' Nobody really wanted to be wrong about it. I'm not saying everybody, but a lot of people had already formed their opinion."[26] Eminem's next studio album in 2020, Music to Be Murdered By (and the Side B – Deluxe Edition) was another surprise release. In an interview on his radio channel Shade 45, he explained the tendency of dropping surprise albums: "I feel like when an album is coming out, if I give people notice. They start seeing the track list and they know it's coming, I feel like, my best shot to avoid it is just to drop it, instead of people thinking to themselves like 'if he got this person on the album, I ain't f**king with it.' It gives everybody too much time to think about it and their expectations of what they think it should be, I will never meet that. So this is kind of theory I have based ever since Revival."[27]

Evermore
, back-to-back in 2020 to commercial success and critical acclaim.

In 2020, American singer-songwriter

Vulture stated that the news of another surprise album from Swift "came as a major shock", as she has been "the industry's most prominent loyalist to the pop-album rollout", who turns her carefully planned releases into "an art of their own".[32] In 2022, three hours after the release of her tenth studio album, Midnights, Swift surprise-released seven additional songs written for but not included in the original 13-song tracklist.[33][34] In 2024, two hours after the release of her eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, Swift surprise-released fifteen additional songs as a double album edition subtitled The Anthology.[35]

Reception

Rachel Finn of DIY said that while surprise albums were becoming too common to be truly surprising, "it gives artists breathing space to really make an impact and retain control over the way their music is released, pre-empting album leaks and taking their album out of the pre-album press cycle to let the music speak for itself."[1] Entrepreneur and freelance writer Cortney Harding wrote in a Medium article that while surprise albums give artists more flexibility, the strategy can usually only pay off for well-known musicians and can be problematic when the album is exclusive to a specific streaming service.[36] David Sackllah of Consequence of Sound noted that while many major artists had attempted a surprise release, few had matched or surpassed the level of excitement of In Rainbows.[5] Writing for The Ringer, Lindsay Zoladz expressed criticism toward overuse of the term that began to dilute its meaning as music journalists were using "surprise album" to describe albums that were previously announced. Zoladz stated:

"'Surprise album' has become such a ubiquitous term that its meaning becomes more vague with each passing tweet. (Last month the Chicago Tribune even used it to describe Drake's Views, an album that not only had a previously announced release date, but which Drake himself had been teasing for the better part of two years.) But even when the phrase is used more precisely, it's becoming a bit hollow; we're living through a deluge of albums — even something as long promised as Rihanna's Anti — that lay claim to that trendy term 'surprise,' but have, like Lemonade, given us a lot of hints that they were coming."[37]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Finn, Rachel (25 March 2019). "Out Of The Blue: A Brief History Of The Surprise Album". DIY. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  2. Ultimate Classic Rock. Archived
    from the original on 1 October 2021. Retrieved 26 December 2021.
  3. ^ Butler, Ben (20 May 2016). "The 10 greatest surprise album drops ever - ranked". Gigwise. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  4. ^ a b Murphy, Sam (29 September 2019). "Why the surprise album drop is falling in popularity". The Music Network. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  5. ^
    Consequence of Sound
    . Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  6. ^ Greenwood, Colin (13 September 2010). "Radiohead's Colin Greenwood: Set yourself free". Index on Censorship. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  7. ^ Leeds, Jeff (6 May 2008). "Nine Inch Nails Album Is Free Online". The New York Times. Retrieved 13 August 2020.
  8. Wenner Media
    . Retrieved 13 August 2020.
  9. ^ Smith, Da'Shan (2 June 2019). "Surprise Albums: 17 Drops That Shocked The Music World". uDiscoverMusic. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  10. ^ Greene, Andy (9 January 2013). "David Bowie Worked in Secret on Comeback LP for Two Years". Rolling Stone. Archived from the original on 13 January 2013. Retrieved 10 January 2013.
  11. ^ Petridis, Alexis (11 January 2013). "The inside story of how David Bowie made The Next Day". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 7 December 2013. Retrieved 19 June 2013.
  12. ^ McCormick, Neil (8 January 2013). "David Bowie's 'Where Are We Now?' – first review". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 14 January 2014. Retrieved 20 November 2013.
  13. ^ O'Leary 2019, chap. 14.
  14. ^ "David Bowie to release new album, with surprise single out now". The Guardian. 8 January 2013. Archived from the original on 2 October 2013. Retrieved 8 January 2013.
  15. ^ Pegg 2016, pp. 308–311.
  16. ^ Smith, Caspar Llewellyn (18 March 2013). "David Bowie tops albums chart for first time in 20 years". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 10 January 2015. Retrieved 17 March 2013.
  17. ^ Caulfield, Keith (19 March 2013). "Bon Jovi Debuts at No. 1 on Billboard 200, David Bowie at No. 2". Billboard. Archived from the original on 22 March 2013. Retrieved 20 March 2013.
  18. ^ Hampp, Andrew (13 December 2013). "How Beyonce's 'Beyonce' Stayed Secret Until the Day of Release, Its First Singles". Billboard. Archived from the original on 17 December 2013. Retrieved 14 December 2013.
  19. ^ "BEYONCÉ Shatters iTunes Store Records with 828,773 Albums Sold in Just Three Days". Apple. 16 December 2013. Retrieved 18 March 2024.
  20. ^ "New albums will come out on Fridays instead of Tuesdays now. Blame Beyonce". 26 February 2015.
  21. ^ Heinzerling, Zachary (Director) (13 December 2013). "Self Titled" Part 1. The Visual Album (Short film, documentary). Retrieved 26 March 2014.
  22. ^
    Vulture. New York
    . Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  23. ^
    Vulture
    . Retrieved 11 December 2020.
  24. Verizon Media
    . Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  25. ^ Ugwu, Reggie (24 August 2016). "Frank Ocean's Apple Deal Was A Wake-Up Call For The Music Industry". BuzzFeed. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  26. ^ "Eminem Talks Surprise "Kamikaze" Release And "Revival" Backlash With Sway". Creative-HipHop. 12 September 2018. Archived from the original on 25 September 2021.
  27. ^ Remy (1 January 2021). "Eminem explains the reason why he prefers to drop surprise albums". SOUTHPAWERS. Retrieved 11 September 2021.
  28. ISSN 0099-9660
    . Retrieved 29 July 2020.
  29. ^ Sodomsky, Sam (24 July 2020). "The National's Aaron Dessner Talks Taylor Swift's New Album folklore". Pitchfork. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
  30. ^ Leight, Elias (23 July 2020). "Taylor Swift Finally Abandoned the Traditional Album Rollout". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 4 September 2020.
  31. ^ "Taylor Swift to release surprise ninth album 'Evermore' tonight". NME | Music, Film, TV, Gaming & Pop Culture News. 10 December 2020. Retrieved 10 December 2020.
  32. Vulture
    . Retrieved 30 January 2020.
  33. ^ Brandle, Lars (21 October 2022). "Taylor Swift's 'Chaotic Surprise' Is 'Midnights (3am Edition),' Featuring 7 Extra Tracks". Billboard. Retrieved 21 October 2022.
  34. ^ Swift, Taylor [@taylorswift13] (21 October 2022). "Surprise! I think of Midnights as a complete concept album, with those 13 songs forming a full picture of the intensities of that mystifying, mad hour. However! There were other songs we wrote on our journey to find that magic 13" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  35. ^ Zemler, Emily (19 April 2024). "Taylor Swift Unveils Double Album The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology". Rolling Stone. Archived from the original on 19 April 2024. Retrieved 19 April 2024.
  36. ^ Harding, Courtney (5 August 2016). "Surprise Album Releases are Terrible". Medium. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  37. ^ Zoladz, Lindsay (1 June 2016). "Save the Term 'Surprise' for Albums That Are Actually Surprising". The Ringer. Spotify. Retrieved 28 July 2020.

Sources

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