On Short Notice

As music has become almost exclusively a digital media, the days of the big-deal record release are quickly fading into the past. It used to be that in the days and weeks before a record was due you would turn on the radio and hear the DJs endlessly promoting it by playing the singles. Then when the day finally came that the record was going to be available, people would rush to the record store and stand in line for the right to buy the CD. Now, you'll still get some run-up before a CD is released and radio stations still beat you over the head with the single in the days before the album is available for download but the days of running to the store to buy the physical copy are definitely dead and gone (that'll happen when on average there is only one remaining record store within any 15-mile radius). There is no sense of urgency because there is no chance the internet is ever going to run out of copies, so rather than "You'd better go and buy it now" the tone has shifted to "Oh, hey. There is this thing. Eventually you should get it. Whatever." It's definitely not the business model I grew up with but I get that times are a changin', so we all just have to learn to adapt. And that lesson was never more apparent than last week when mega-artist Beyonce release a CD with no advanced notice whatsoever and it immediately shot all the way to #1. Hope no one in the music industry got too comfortable with the way things had been done the last couple of years because apparently it could be on the verge of changing all over again.

I have to say, as impressed as I am that Beyonce can turn the internet on its head just by releasing 14 songs (and 18 accompanying videos) I am far more impressed that she was able to keep the fact she had even recorded an album a secret. In this age of internet over-sharing it feels like everyone knows what is happening with everyone else at all times and that is just your average citizen. When you are a star at the level of a Beyonce everything you do attracts a massive amount of attention and every step you take towards a recording studio immediately becomes fodder for gossip websites. On top of that there are just so many people involved in the production of a CD like this - musicians, back-up singers, producers, sound engineers, directors to shoot the videos, stylists as well as the normal staff at the recording studios and online distributors (you can swear the people involved directly with the project to secrecy but janitors, secretaries and the like don't sign a confidentiality agreement) - I am just shocked there was not at least one pair of loose lips in the bunch. I would have at least thought someone from her record label would have "slipped" and given the news to someone with a nationwide radio show so they could let people know when it was going on sale. Yet no one even uploaded a single lyric which is staggering. (And could be the most important development. The reason this strategy could be a game-changer is it's the best way to fight piracy. As soon as a single hits the radio waves you can find a copy online and that eliminates the need to buy it, which takes money away from the artist.) Instead everyone kept their mouths shut and their illegal mp3 copies on their laptops, which I guess just speaks to the power of Beyonce.

But for as interesting a story as this is about one artist and her fans, in my mind this news actually serves the dual purpose of firing a warning shot across the bow of two industries I am very familiar with - radio and advertising. Radio has to be shaking in their boots right now because if artists no longer need them to promote singles than exactly what purpose do they serve? Sure, it is nice when a radio station plays a song I hadn't heard in a long while but more often than not the terrestrial radio stations in Boston play the same 10 tracks on a near-continuous loop. I get more variety from my iPod on shuffle mode and I can skip songs I don't like, which is why I use it more often. As for the advertising side of things, I think this is just further proof that people make up their minds early about a product and no amount of clever advertising will get them to change it in either direction. Considering most of these companies pay advertising agencies a lot of money because they promise they can do exactly that, this has to be making people who create ad campaigns a little queasy. I mean, think of all the money Beyonce just made by not paying anyone to promoter her album and watching it still sell half a million copies the first weekend. Why would she ever go back and hire these people to produce a convoluted commercial to alert the masses about her new project when all she has to do is send out one tweet and let her fans take it from there? No ad campaign could be that cost-effective, I don't care how clever a slogan they could come up with.

The good news for anyone who works in either industry is that the list of people who could pull of this feat is pretty short. Beyonce has a long track record of producing songs which have a good beat and that her fans enjoy, so they wouldn't have any problem forking over their money without getting a little sample first. Sure, every musical act has a few hundred people who have that kind of faith in them but most music lovers are going to want to hear two or three good songs before they take you at your word they will enjoy the rest just as much and buy an entire album. Still, it has to be a bad feeling for people in radio because it is not like there is anything they can do differently for the next time something like this happens. They are at the mercy of the artists and the labels and if those people decide to cut them out of the action there really isn't much they can do about it. Now, advertising is a little more fortunate because they can take some lessons from this and change their ways. For example, I think the strong sales for an album with no advanced noticed just proves to the advertising world that people no longer need to be inundated with weeks and month worth of ads to get them to buy a product. In this click-and-buy world people make a decision in a split-second and continually trying them to change their mind is just going to annoy them into hating a product they were previously just disinterested in. Maybe tone things back a bit and see if you can't keep your skin in the game by at least not charging a huge amount to these mega-artists who clearly don't need you. Of course, knowing how advertising works they will probably go the other way, cranking things into overdrive to try and make themselves appear more valuable. I can only hope next time Beyonce drops a double-album and finishes them off.