In December 2007, Thom Yorke explained Radiohead’s rationale for releasing their then-new album, In Rainbows, with just 10 days’ warning and a “pay what you like” price tag. It was, quaintly, an unheard-of way of doing things back then. “We were trying to avoid that whole game of who gets in first with the reviews,” he told David Byrne in a Wired interview. “These days there’s so much paper to fill, or digital paper to fill, that whoever writes the first few things gets cut and pasted. Whoever gets their opinion in first has all that power.” Radiohead didn’t want to defer to the whims of grumpy reviewers. They wanted the power.
This stealth release method led to what was, at that time, unusual: a communal listening experience across the globe. In February 2011, Radiohead once again announced a release date only a handful of days ahead of time, for The King of Limbs. But by December 2013, Beyoncé had taken the surprise release to new heights by giving no warning ahead of the sudden iTunes appearance of her self-titled“visual album.” Where only a few years earlier Lady Gaga, Daft Punk, and Arcade Fire had taken choreographed album rollouts to elaborate extremes, soon so many albums arrived unannounced either to combat leaks (Björk’s Vulnicura, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly) or to punctuate long-awaited returns (D’Angelo’s Black Messiah) that critics began to complain of “surprise album fatigue.”
But in the last few weeks, Radiohead and Beyoncé (among others) have subtly refined the formula they popularized, doing more to ensure that audiences not only listen but do so at an exact time, ostensibly together. These artists are consolidating their control over the experience—and the monetization—of hearing a new album.
Each in different ways, Radiohead, Beyoncé, Drake, and James Blake have all made short-notice announcements of not just release dates for new albums, but specific times as well. Moreover, many of these streaming “events” fell outside of the new global release day of Friday, which the industry standardized only last year, partially in response to surprise drops. The result is a community-driven tune-in experience that's comparable to the appointment viewing (and tweeting) that drives prestige TV.
When Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool arrived digitally at 7 p.m. UK time on May 9, BBC Radio 6 streamed a global “listening party.” Beyoncé’s Lemonade actually wasprestige TV; the surprise was that her April 23rd HBO special was her next visual album. Drake’s VIEWSwas touted for a 10 p.m. EST premiere on April 28 via his OVO Sound Radio show on Apple Music’s Beats 1, a premiere that ended up being a bloated interview with Aubrey himself; meanwhile, VIEWS arrived on Apple Music and iTunes. Though not a formal listening party, Blake set a last-minute release time on May 5—during primetime for much of America, no less—for The Colour in Anything. (Kanye West’s The Life of Pablorelease was different in many ways, but it's worth noting that the album's initial Tidal-streamed live premiere at Madison Square Garden was yet another example of how rollouts are shifting towards listening events.)
The numbers so far suggest that driving audiences toward a specific listening time is working. Drake’s VIEWSdebuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, breaking the record for album streams in a single week. Every song from Beyoncé’s Lemonade, which topped the Billboard 200 album chart,individually cracked the Hot 100.It’s too soon to gauge Blake’s chart performance, but enough success might show that someone who isn’t currently a commercial force like Drake or Beyoncé—though he has professional ties to both of them—can also take advantage of the appointment-listening wave.
More important, from a music fan’s perspective at least, are the questions these seemingly communal events raise about listening in our current era, even versus a few years ago. Are we able to focus our scattered attention more, the way people supposedly did before they could hop from song to song, artist to artist, in the click of a button? Could tune-in releases help point toward a listening future where the calculated strategy surrounding album rollouts can—gasp!—again take a back seat to the music itself? Or are these listening events, like many facets of our current media environment, just another way to capitalize on the power of social-media trending? (Oh the irony of Radiohead trending, given Radiohead’s own deletion of their social media accounts.)
The answer may be some combination of the three. For BBC Radio 6’s Tom Robinson, who presented the A Moon Shaped Pool listening party, the sheer logistics necessitated a different type of listening. “We couldn’t even listen to the whole album before we started broadcasting,” he tells me. “We had a team of people listening through to make sure that the language was OK for the BBC to broadcast.” He adds, with a chuckle, “We didn’t even hear the title of the damn album until five minutes before we went live.”
The high-profile occasion meant he didn’t talk over the ends of songs, as radio DJs are trained to do, and he describes the whole studio relaxing as each track passed—and, to their delight, didn’t disappoint. “The biggest relief was that it was good,” Robinson says. In particular, he remembers playing “Glass Eyes,” shortly before the show’s half-hour mark. “That just made me in tears in the studio as it was coming up," he adds. "I had to compose myself to announce into the news.”
Nor is Robinson a stranger to listener interaction. His Sunday night show, “The BBC Introducing Mixtape,” is largely unscripted and driven by audience recommendations. Still, a new Radiohead album is a different matter, and during the broadcast he read enraptured tweets from listeners worldwide about the beauty of sharing this moment in real time with the world. “How wonderful,” he says, “that there were people tweeting us from Russia, from Italy, from South America who were sharing the experience, heaving this stuff at the same time that we were.”
The timing of the calls to tune in to these new albums, usually just a couple of days in advance, seems to reflect the social web’s current pace. A new Pew Research study finds that when it comes to articles, at least, mobile users tend to engage only in the first few days after publication. To some, sadly, albums are just another form of content, something to be consumed while it’s top of mind, forgotten once it’s not. This is the larger media environment that artists must consider if they want to reach the masses. Radiohead, Beyoncé, and Drake can turn their albums into events because they’re already big enough that the BBC, HBO, and Apple want to work with them. Other artists may find it’s more important to have their music be available wherever and whenever potential fans might want to hear it.
“People have this power,” Yorke sings, in a very different context, on A Moon Shaped Pool. As digital services continue to evolve, that power is what the broader music community is still trying to figure out how to harness.