From flooding our feeds with album release dates to shamelessly countdown-ing singles, music artists have had to get more creative to get fans to actually buy their work. Here are the five most notable ways artists have dropped albums:
5. Radiohead: “In Rainbows”
People love free stuff, so Radiohead let the fans pick their price. Putting “In Rainbows” up for donations, a majority took the band up on its offer. In addition to the fans who paid what they thought the album was worth, Radiohead also saw an increase in sales of previous albums.
Radiohead went to No. 3 on Billboard’s Buzz 100 chart in 2007.
4. Arcade Fire: “Reflektor“
Most of us like to keep tabs on our celebs, and Twitter can be a direct form of communication between you and your favorite artist.
Arcade Fire took this communication one step further by announcing its second album to the world via a single reply to a fan’s tweet.
Whoever got that initial tweet is still probably gloating.
From there, the mystery only grew.
Drawings of the same street art began to appear in cities all over, with “REFLEKTOR” written into the geometry of each design.
On Aug. 26, a mural materialized on a building in downtown Manhattan emblazoned with the words, “ARCADE FIRE 9 p.m. 9/9” followed by four Reflektor patterns.
The drawings worked.
Arcade Fire’s “Reflektor” debuted as No. 1 on the Billboard top 200 in 2013 and sold 140,000 copies in its first week.
3. Kanye West: “Yeezus”
If anyone would shamelessly countdown their album every day on Twitter, you would think it would be Kanye, right?
Surprisingly, no.
Ditching the clear-cut path of self promotion, West dropped “Yeezus” after mismatched clues prior to its release.
On May 1, fans only saw one cryptic tweet reading, “June Eighteen.”
On May 17, Kanye projected a new music video from “Yeezus,” which he only broadcast in 66 public, outdoor places around the world.
He later performed two songs with his new musical style that shocked West fans on “SNL.”
“Yeezus” was released in a plain Jewel CD case with no album art and no distractions from his music.
The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard top 200 in 2013 and sold 327,000 copies in its first week.
2. Daft Punk: “Random Access Memories”
Instead of strictly using online ads and social media, Daft Punk kicked it old school to reflect its new vibe. The band rolled out a series of tribute advertisements, with the first being giant billboards in metropolitan cities showing its new logo. Then there was a 15-second commercial during “SNL” previewing their new song, “Get Lucky.” The band aired two more commercials, one notably appearing randomly on main-stage screens at Coachella.
Information about the album was released little by little: first the names in April, then the single “Get Lucky” soon after, and finally a digital stream of the album on May 13.
The album was finally released on May 17 and sold 339,000 copies in its first week.
1. Beyoncé: “Beyoncé”
The queen works only with elegance.
Queen B kept her poise and grace as she silently released arguably the most influential album of 2013 at the very end of the year.
The self-titled “Beyoncé” dropped without warning or announcement.
No tweets, no countdowns, no singles, no promotion at all.
And this was the best promotion she could have had.
The album, released on Dec. 13, sold more than 80,000 digital copies in the first three hours of the release, according to billboard.com.
A few things factor into the huge success of the artist’s fifth studio album: strong themes of female empowerment, the concept of a visual album and the exclusiveness of the tracks the first week. No one could resist it.
The album went on to sell 828,773 copies over just the first weekend.
[A version of this story ran on page 7 on 1/23/2014 under the headline "Freebies to surprises: Artists drop albums in creative ways"]
