At approximately 9 p.m. on Monday, Kid Cudi took to his Twitter account and told his fans that he had a big surprise for them. His fourth album, Satellite Flight: The Journey to Mother Moon, was finished, and he wanted to share it with the world. So he released it through iTunes at midnight.
Cudi’s approach wasn’t totally without precedent, of course. In December, Beyoncé dropped her fifth solo album the same way—on iTunes at midnight without warning. And we imagine other artists will use this approach moving forward, too. After all, both Beyoncé and Cudi soared to the top of the iTunes charts shortly after their projects were released.
Before this turns into a full-fledged trend, though, we think that artists need to remember that this method of releasing music is not for everyone. While it can be very effective for some, it could also be a huge fail—and potentially end your career—if you don’t execute the release properly.
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PRO: When an artist releases a surprise album, it feels like the artist is doing it for his or her fans. The artist isn’t trying to sell their fans on an album—even though they are technically selling it to them. Rather, they’re giving their fans a gift and letting them be the first ones to hear their work.
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CON: In order to keep a surprise album a surprise, artists can’t let many people hear it. That can be considered a good thing (the old “too many chefs in the kitchen” cliché applies to a lot of albums these days). But it can also be bad. Because if an album isn’t as good as it should be, the artist doesn’t have anyone there to tell them that they need to make improvements to it.
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PRO: Fans are more likely to spend $10 on a surprise album than they are to pay $10 for an album with a release date that was announced three months ago. An album that has a set release date is almost always going to leak out ahead of time. A surprise album likely won’t and will only be available, at least initially, to fans willing to pay for it.
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CON: The lack of a definitive release date for a surprise album means that a record label has no time to properly promote the album to the masses. So if an artist doesn’t have a fan base that’s large enough to support a project that isn’t promoted on TV, radio, and the Web, it’s not going to shoot to the top of the iTunes sales chart.
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PRO: A surprise album will get a lot of attention on social media. #SatelliteFlight was trending on Twitter for most of Monday and Tuesday because so many people were discussing it. That’s something that probably wouldn’t have happened if the album was released using a more traditional method.
Photo Credit: Twitter
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CON: Surprise albums aren’t always going to feel like real albums. In Cudi’s case, a lot of people are already talking about his next project. It almost feels like Satellite Flight is a mixtape designed to promote whatever he’s got coming next.
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PRO: When a surprise album drops, fans get to enjoy and dissect it at the same time. This happens occasionally when a new album leaks on the Internet. But if an album leaks at, say, a Thursday afternoon at 2 p.m. when a lot of people are at work and school, the moment is lost. By releasing a project at midnight, though, artists are able to control their release and get a bunch of fans excited about it at the same time.
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CON: If a surprise album isn’t good, fans will wonder why an artist didn’t take more time with it. Even if the artist did take a lot of time to create it, albums that are released out of nowhere feel rushed.
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PRO: The element of surprise results in more hype around projects. Had Beyoncé or Kid Cudi released their latest in a more traditional way, they would have had some people talking about them. But by surprising people, they had everyone taking a closer look at their projects. Even people who aren’t fans of theirs appreciated the fact that they provided some excitement out of nowhere.
Photo Credit: Rolling Stone
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CON: The novelty of surprise albums will eventually wear off. Once a few more artists use this blueprint, people will get desensitized to it. Also, Beyoncé set the bar incredibly high. So no matter how good a surprise album is, it’s likely going to fall short of what she was able to do.
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