Member Since: 4/28/2012
Posts: 37,654
|
BB: Before Beyoncé, artists relied on traditional marketing
Quote:
The Year In Surprise Rollouts: How Beyonce, Frank Ocean & Kanye West Remixed Album Releases In 2016
Surprise releases are about as shocking as a Kanye West rant at this point. Since Beyoncé sneakily stopped the world with her eponymous album in 2013, the onslaught of covert rollouts has made music fans accustomed to blind-siding LP drops.
Pre-Beyoncé, artists relied on traditional marketing for new music: lead single, radio spins, TV appearances and the announcement of a set release date. For years, that working model gave musicians the best chance to dominate charts or at least keep their buzz revving for their die-hard fans. But now with digital evolutions in the music marketplace, including streaming (we all know selling a needle-moving amount of physical albums is rare unless you’re Adele) and artists carefully avoiding online leaks, the pantheon of established musicians are now generating a craftier, more dynamic build-up to capture the attention of the nose-deep-in-Twitter generation.
Arguably, no artists weathered the changing music marketing climate better than the woman who mastered the art. At every turn, Bey was creating time-arresting events for every music drop. In February, she unexpectedly released "Formation" and caused a windstorm of conversation about race and culture. Later, she parlayed the explosive tune into a Super Bowl 50 halftime performance alongside Bruno Mars and Coldplay. Then in April, the pop culture queen shattered expectations of the new music strategy altogether by presenting an hour-long HBO feature film to accompany her 12-track, multi-genre opus titled Lemonade, which premiered exclusively on her husband Jay Z's streaming service Tidal. Almost immediately, the dual event was heralded as her greatest work, moving 653,000 equivalent album units in its first week of release and pulling in 787,000 viewers in the 18-49 demographic. And if her nine 2017 Grammy nominations are any indication, that astonishment-meets-talent marketing formula can be outstandingly impactful.
|
x
We kinda all already knew this but 
|
|
|
|
