Last week Beyoncé released her album Beyoncé on iTunes without any notice. The move shocked both fans and music business professionals alike. Many believed a new album was inevitable, but a sales date hadn’t been dictated via the usual recording industry marketing channels. In fact, no one knew that she was actually working on an album, much less had a product ready to drop.
On Friday the 13th, Beyoncé released her first “visual” album, aptly named because the full package included fourteen new tracks and seventeen new videos in which she collaborated with superstars such as Timbaland, Pharrell, Drake, Justin Timberlake, Miguel, Sia, and Frank Ocean. Caught off guard, many industry writers and critics quickly dubbed the feat a “game changer”, but is it really?
There is no doubt that what Beyoncé and her team did was a spectacular marketing move. First, they managed to keep the lid closed on a major release from a major superstar. And not just any superstar, but one who recently played one of the industry’s largest stages – Super Bowl XLVII. Add in the fact that this bigger-than-life celebrity collaborated on this new album with a slue of other superstars including Pharrell, Timbaland, and Drake, it is amazing that the paparazzi, news agencies, or NSA didn’t leak word of this dream team in the studio. Regardless, was this really an “industry” game changer?
Sure Beyoncé’s team was able to drop the album overnight, but they did it on iTunes, which requires virtually no distribution. So was it really a game changer?
The press thinks so.
Many new agencies quickly hopped on the “industry game changer” bandwagon. USA titled their article Beyonce’s big secret is a music game changer, and the editor of Billboard, Bill Werde, was quoted as stating “I think on one hand what it really speaks to is the emerging power that artists have to go direct to fans”. Collectively the sentiment has been the same. With this release Beyoncé has changed the way we market music.
She really hasn’t
Truth is, for something to be an industry game changer it needs to affect the entire industry. This marketing move is not available to the entire industry. It relies on motivating social media and the press to spread the word about an artist. The problem is, the press needs a reason to talk about a particular artist. They need a superstar that the World already knows about; a great name, a great face, a great brand that motivates news consumers to read their articles and that is exactly what Beyoncé provides. If an unknown indie band decided to mimic this same plan, I can almost guarantee they will not be as successful. Hell, if 80-90% of the artists out there today tried this, they wouldn’t be as successful as Mrs. Carter.
When you have already built a brand as powerful as Beyoncé,according to Forbes she is the fourth largest grossing female musician of 2013 at $53 million, you can afford to attempt new and unique marketing strategies. You can sell it off that you are trying to connect more closely with your fans, or that you are attempting to change the game, but the truth is you are just playing to one of your greatest marketable assets – your name. The best way to leverage that power is with a plan that attracts the attention of the press and creates a buzz around the release. That is what her team did, and quite successfully. By the end of the day she had the number one and number two albums on iTunes, had amassed 1.2 million tweets in 12 hours, and temporarily crashed the iTune store.
This was a widely successful calculated release, and kudos to Beyoncé and her team. However, it wasn’t a game changer. It is not a marketing move that can be copied by just any artist and it will not become the status quo for the industry, only for the select few with the same brand recognition and resources available to a superstar like Beyoncé.