It takes balls to release something this ambitious on Friday the 13th. Or rather, it takes Beyonce.
Beyonce's fifth album, Beyonce, arrives today without forewarning, without any formal pre-promotion, and without any leaks. How sly was the release? She hasn't even mentioned it on Twitter — or anything, for that matter since mdi-August.
It's a seismic release that upends nearly every rule held sacred in the music business-as-usual:
The end of the Tuesday streetdate: Albums are traditionally released on Tuesdays, to get a full week of Soundscan sales data and to ensure as impressive a debut above the Billboard Top 200 sales chart. But, is there a bigger "baller move" than to say "screw the charts, we'll release it when we want." The message is she isn't competing with Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Britney or whatever other female superstar you want to use as a comparison. She's above them, and above the charts. - The end of the set-up: Albums traditionally require months of set-up, especially for courting retail and press, both of whom have deadline and production logistics, thereby opening the doors for albums to leak. But, who in the entertainment press isn't going to rearrange their day to cover this event? If magazines and newspapers are a week or a month behind, well, they're already years behind how people actually consume information and news. And why risk leaking your album so Best Buy can hide it behind the vacuum department, or so that some journalist nobody reads can give it 3 stars?
- The end of physical retail: Despite the fact that the CD aisle — note I don't use plural there — in most big box stores has been relegated to the most remote parcel of floor space, and most consumers would be hard pressed to tell you where their local record store is located, the prevailing wisdom has been that physical sales still matter. So much, in fact, that it's not uncommon for superstars to cut exclusive retail deals for prime positioning and guaranteed sales at stores like Target and Wal Mart. Well, there is no physical version of Beyonce's album. At least not yet. If you want it, you buy it exclusively through iTunes.
The end of the single and the video being separate entities: Recording artists make singles and album. Videos come later, when the discussion turns to how you'll market this music. Well, in a reality where most people discover and consume their music on YouTube, it doesn't make any sense at all for the video and the song to not be entwined. I've said before that one day the idea that albums wouldn't have a visual component for each song would someday be anachronistic. That day isn't today, but it's where it starts: Beyonce is billed as a Visual Album. There's a video for every song. Just want the music? Too bad. For $15 you get the album and the videos.
And tht's what we have here: A Visual Album where there's a proper music video for every song — actually, there are 14 songs and 17 videos — released as a cohesive whole.
We'll take a look at them all here today, but if you want to see them for yourself you need to buy the Visual Album from iTunes, since YouTube just has :30 second previews and there's nothing on the streaming sites... for now.
