10 crazy ways to launch an album

In 2007, record stores were already struggling to get by when Radiohead arrived and pushed them into oblivion. It all happens with a post published by Jonny Greenwood on the Radiohead website on September 30th. «Hello everyone, the new album is finished and will be released in 10 days; we called it In Rainbows. With love from all of us.”

The post included a link to a website where fans find they can pay as much as they want (even zero) for an MP3 version of the album. With a little extra money they can also buy a physical album along with a bonus disc with eight additional songs. Whatever they choose, though, there will be no need to go to the Virgin Megastore or Tower Records. The move proves to be a huge success and provides a model for many other artists to follow. However, some criticize Radiohead for offering fans a compressed version of the LP as a download rather than a high-resolution file.

Michael Jackson knew he had to make a strong gesture to win back his fans after the allegations of child sexual abuse that had persecuted him during the Dangerous tour. For this reason he decides to release a double album containing his greatest hits on one disc, and a completely new album on the second. To promote HIStory: Past, Present, and Future and the accompanying tour, 30-foot-tall, 9-ton statues of Michael Jackson are placed around the world, including on the Thames in London and at Alexanderplatz in Berlin.

A four-minute teaser video featuring Jackson as a benevolent dictator/demigod commanding an army of endless soldiers is also made, culminating in the unveiling of the statue. This sparks considerable interest in the album, and singles like Scream And You Are Not Alone become successes. However, it is a disappointment compared to his previous three albums and marks the beginning of a significant decline in Jackson's career.

Before lashing out against Jews and releasing a song titled Heil HitlerKanye West still enjoyed a fair amount of popularity in the music industry and with the general public. Thanks to this, on February 11, 2016 he managed to book Madison Square Garden for a launch party for The Life of Pablo which doubles as a fashion show for his Yeezy clothing line. The event features a small army of models standing on two giant cubes, the album blaring and countless people watching the live stream.

Once the album premiered on Tidal, Kanye continued to tweak it over the next few days and weeks. There was no real precedent in music history for treating an album as a living work of art that changes without warning, and fans did their best to document the slightest alterations. In many ways, this was Kanye at the height of his power. All that followed was a gradual decline, although today he is playing stadiums again.

It's all too easy to criticize U2 for giving every iPhone user on the planet their 2014 album, Songs of Innocence. But let's try to take a step back and look at the issue from their point of view. In those days, record stores were dead, music had moved entirely online. After having huge success promoting their 2004 single Vertigo through an iPod commercial, this gimmick seemed like a great way to share their work with the widest possible audience, at no cost to listeners.

But they probably hadn't thought it through. U2 weren't exactly at the height of their popularity in 2014 Songs of Innocence it's not exactly Achtung Baby or War in terms of quality or innovation. Plus “anyone with an iPhone” is a lot of people, and many of them simply had no interest in a new U2 album. The backlash was brutal, so much so that U2 still haven't fully recovered from the damage to their image.

Daft Punk's performance at Coachella in 2006 is perhaps the most legendary performance in the festival's history. And every year since then, frenzied rumors like “Daft Punk are back at Coachella!” have spread without any concrete follow-up. But in 2013 the duo used the Coachella stage to unveil a two-minute trailer for their upcoming album, Random Access Memoriesand the launch single Get Lucky.

This is exactly the audience they wanted to excite, and the move has yielded better results than they could have expected. Random Access Memories it sold millions of copies all over the world and won Grammys. Get Lucky it became one of the biggest songs of the year. And they did all this without a tour or any kind of traditional press campaign.

As a general rule, if you find a USB stick in a public restroom, it's best to leave it there. There's no telling what nightmares await you, legal or otherwise, if you upload data to your computer. But for the select few who saw Nine Inch Nails on their 2007 European tour and took home thumb drives found in the bathrooms, the reward was enormous: high-quality MP3s of songs from their Year Zero LP. Before long, the songs spread across the Internet.

The RIAA didn't like this method of promoting the album, which also included a secret website and an alternate reality game, but Trent Reznor didn't care. “The USB stick was simply a mechanism for disseminating the music and data we wanted to make public,” he said Guardian. «CD media is obsolete and irrelevant. What people want is something bad: DRM-free music (digital rights management, ed.) with whom he can do whatever he wants. If the greedy record industry embraced this concept, I believe people would pay for music and consume more of it.”

On December 13, 2013, at midnight, Beyoncé shocked her fanbase and the music industry by surprisingly releasing her self-titled album on iTunes, along with videos for all 14 songs. Fans who happened to be awake stayed up all night enjoying the new material, while others woke up to this sudden news. In any case, this move created a wave of attention that sent the album to number one worldwide. In the first three days alone, over 617,000 copies were sold.

It was proof that you don't need hidden USB sticks, blocks of ice or stadium fashion shows to promote an album. Sometimes you just need to keep a really big secret, spend months planning, and then take action with the push of a button.

Months before Beyoncé surprised the world with her album, David Bowie accomplished an even greater feat by celebrating his 66th birthday by announcing that he had spent the last two years secretly recording an album in New York City. “I hadn't even told my kids who was working here,” said Steve Rosenthal, owner of the Magic Shop studio in the city center, where Bowie recorded the LP. «To no one».

Bowie didn't give a single interview to promote it The Next Dayand did not perform live or appear in public. This anti-PR campaign was very effective in generating interest in the album and the nostalgic launch single Where Are We Now?. Throughout the '90s and early 2000s, Bowie worked tirelessly to sell his new music to the world. It was only at the end of his life that he discovered that the best way to do this was to simply disappear.

Most music artists aspire to sell as many albums as possible. But the Wu-Tang Clan took the opposite approach in 2015, when they recorded a double album of previously unreleased songs, pressed a single copy, deleted the master file, stored it in a secret vault in Mexico and auctioned it off to the highest bidder.

“The music industry is in crisis,” they wrote. «The intrinsic value of music has been reduced to zero. Contemporary art is worth millions by virtue of its exclusivity… By taking a 400-year-old Renaissance-style approach to music, offering it as commissioned merchandise and allowing it to follow a similar path from creation to display to sale… we hope to inspire and intensify urgent debates about the future of music.”

Martin Shkreli, CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, purchased the album for $2 million. After going to prison for financial fraud, his assets were seized and the album was sold for $2.2 million by a Hong Kong-based entity. In 2021, they sold it for $4 million to an NFT company. Audiences have been able to hear snippets and low-quality recordings, but few people have ever heard the work in full.

In 2007, Kanye West's career was on the rise, while 50 Cent's was in decline. But for a brief moment, the two achieved broadly similar levels of fame. That's why it made sense for both of them to release their new albums on the same day, which coincidentally happened to be the sixth anniversary of 9/11, and team up to promote the competition for the top spot on the album charts. Billboardeven posing for a double cover of Rolling Stone.

50 Cent had stated that if Kanye sold more copies than him, he would retire from the music industry. But when Kanye easily surpassed him – 2.1 million versus 1.3 million – he backtracked on that promise. That's when Kanye became the biggest name in hip-hop while Curtis it is today best remembered as the album Kanye beat.