Last November, the circulation of a private document—actually, a digital image of a private document—suggested something miraculous was possibly about to happen. Titled "Release Confirmation" and stamped with Parkwood Entertainment and Columbia Records’ logos, that document circulated as tantalizing evidence that, just maybe, there was more Beyoncé music coming…not just soon, but maybe immediately? Turned out, no, it was a fake (of course), and there wouldn’t be a repeat of Queen Bey’s epochal December 2013 sudden-release of her self-titled "video album"—the most awe-inspiring release stunt since Radiohead’s 2007 In Rainbows gambit—but merely an expanded re-issue of that LP with a couple bonus tracks.
Add up the elements of this all-too-brief mystery/hoax and you get a perfect encapsulation of what might be called the recording industry’s ever-evolving circulatory system a decade-and-a-half into its digital era. Unconfirmed, leaked evidence about a new release is often accompanied by the suspicion that it all might be engineered by the artist—all part of a broader sense of anticipation that with a famous, boundary-pushing artist, something new might just drop out of nowhere. Stunt releases function as political statements, bursts of emotional expression, savvy branding ploys, or corporate alliances, and often a combination of one or more. The rationales for releases mutate as quickly as the technologies emerge, and for an increasing number of artists, artistic expression isn’t merely the domain of recordings and performances, but extends to the domain of promotion and release.
Advance promotion and stunt-releases are as old as the record business itself—the Foo Fighters, for one, paired with HBO to release Sonic Highways one track at a time via a documentary built to strengthen their claim to a spot in the musty old Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—but the strategies are most always reflective of their historical moment. In August 2014, a blimp bearing the unique logo known to Aphex Twin was spotted floating over London, while graffiti of the same logo started showing up around London and New York. The campaign linked into a much more modern form of mystery, manifesting itself via a link posted on Aphex Twin’s Twitter, leading to Tor, an anonmyous "Deep Web" software service perfect for an artist obsessed with disguises and privacy. Using Tor, 133,000 Aphex Twin fans discovered Syro’s tracklisting and cover art. This revelation was soon followed, quite predictably in the electronicmusic realm, by the circulation of several fake versions of the album on YouTube and SoundCloud, the validity of which Richard James himself denied.
Tor’s users and defenders claim that the software is simply a way to communicate anonymously online, though American and British intelligence agencies see it differently, claiming that it’s a dangerous medium used for the dissemination of state secrets and child pornography. Yet in the wake of Syro’s sui generis promotion, some wondered if Tor could ever go legitimate as a distribution platform, handling, say, a Taylor Swift level of traffic. Tor can’t, but a month after Syro, Thom Yorke, known more for battling Spotify than for his own music, proved that BitTorrent could. By suddenly releasing his new LP Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes as a $6 BitTorrent bundle, Yorke paired with BitTorrent.com to help re-launch the platform—which, like Tor, its adherents have long claimed has as many legitimate as illegitimate uses. Driven by Yorke’s popularity, the gambit worked well, with 1 million official downloads in the first six days of release.
Thom Yorke aligning himself with BitTorrent and Aphex Twin with Tor are both subtle political statements. The infrastructures of each technology are political, making claims about about sharing/speed and anonymity. Not all artist/tech pairings are so progressive, though. Also in September, U2’s ultra-awkward collaboration with Apple’s iCloud was an abject failure, at least in the court of public opinion. What was intended to be a grand gesture of goodwill—giving a new album from the world’s biggest band away for free—instead registered as a clunky shared PR move and, despite the fact that Apple is constantly forcing iPhone users to download things they don’t want, a privacy invasion (the exact opposite of Tor’s all-anonymous ideology). Bono, like a politician caught making a dumb statement, publicly apologized. The whole kerfluffle was perhaps summed up best by El-P a couple months later: "you can't break into somebody's house and leave a present on their kitchen counter and expect them to not get mad, and expect them not to get mad about the fact that you broke their window."
El-P knows from free music, of course: his Killer Mike collaboration Run the Jewels released both of their LPs as free digital downloads. Such a tactic itself isn’t anything new in rap, of course. Since the turn of the millennium, rappers have far outpaced other musicians in maximizing digital affordances: giving away music free online and relying on tours, licensing, and product promotion for revenue. The idea goes straight to the top, too: last year Drake simply dropping new tracks on his SoundCloud with no other promotion was enough to make them hits, and Kanye’s demo-esque Paul McCartney New Year’s Eve surprise launched a thousand thinkpieces. But Run the Jewels are different than other rappers, inasmuch as the duo seem powered by deep emotional connections—to each other, to their music (and its history), and to their fervent fanbase. A connection to their fans—an overused cliché, but one that actually matters when one of your group is rap's greatest political ambassador since Chuck D—and a disdain for industry bullshit is what makes RTJ give away their music. And it’s exactly these feelings, and their self-made flexibility which produced the minor "stunt" aspect of RTJ2’s release. As they were riding a post-concert hight on the night they were set to drop the album online, seeing clips from the album already circulating online (physical copies were already at retail) they decided, according to Mike: "We're not going to let anybody do this wrong. We're gonna do it right…Fuck it, drop it."
For very different reasons, two other high-profile artists opted for the "fuck it, drop it" rationale last year as well. After a two-year, very public spat with Interscope ("I'm tired of having to consult a group of old white guys about my black girl craft." She tweeted in January 2014), Azealia Banks used a variation of the the "fuck it, drop it" M.O. herself in early November. "We thought the best way to mend fences with the world was to release the music [without advance notice]," her manager told Billboard, her overwrought phrasing indicating the release was an attempt at a P.R. reboot. If Banks’ tried to mend her public image with a unique album release, D'Angelo is the exact opposite: everyone loves him, and everyone had been waiting 14 years for a followup to Voodoo. On a Sunday evening last December, unofficially announced by a Q-Tip tweet in which he was so excited that he misspelled D'Angelo’s Twitter handle, Black Messiah emerged out of nowhere. Once people started digging into the album’s liner notes as they leaked online, it became clear that simple surprise wasn’t the point of the unannounced release. "It’s about people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough and decides to make change happen," he wrote. "Black Messiah is not one man. It’s a feeling that, collectively, we are all that leader." After a decade and a half of silence and who knows how many months in the studio recording, D'Angelo calmly issued what he hoped would be a sonic balm for one of the most tumultuous years of racial strife in recent memory.
Yet trumping all of these release stunts in terms of sheer attention, much like her album’s comparatively gaudy sales numbers drowned out the rest of the music world, was Taylor Swift. Her decision to exempt Spotify from 1989’s digital circulation itself was nothing new—lots of major artists resent the cannibalizing effects of the platform’s free tier as often as smaller ones see it as the McDonalds of digital distro—and it might have been a top-down missive from her label, but either way, it shook up the business merely because of its origin. A few months earlier, Swift had taken to the op-ed section of the Wall Street Journal to strike the first blow in what amounted to a long-lead statement of release purpose. The real value of music, Swift opined with her conservative streak showing, comes not via economic advantage, but merely by how much "heart" one puts into the music. If 2014 ends up standing for anything, maybe it’s that emotion does comprise a part of music’s digital circulatory system even for artists without Swift’s built-in advantages, but that the pathways the music takes, and the statements it makes, are more impossible to predict than ever.