Beyoncé’s 388-day album campaign and the death of premiere culture

By: Cherie HuMarcus Dowling

Published: 2020-09-16

Music-industry professionals normally set aside anywhere from around three to six months for an album release campaign — i.e. the amount of time needed to plan and execute the marketing plan for an album leading up to its release. But as many music critics have argued, the traditional approach to album releases may be irrelevant in the age of streaming, as the temporal and financial costs of distribution fall to near zero while the speed of cultural tastes continues to accelerate, waiting for no one.

Beyoncé has broken the traditional rules of music marketing in the polar opposite way: Her latest album campaign was at least 388 days long.

It’s a profound feat with significant implications. The Lion King: The Gift — the Queen Bey-curated, Billboard chart-topping soundtrack album for Disney’s photorealistic remake of The Lion King — was first released on July 19, 2019, nine days after the first single “Spirit” dropped early. The album mined the Venn diagram among soul, hip-hop and Afrobeats; 90% of its tracks feature some level of involvement from artists or producers born on the African continent, with notable examples including Burna Boy, Wizkid, P2J and DJ Lag.

Two months later, ABC aired the behind-the-scenes documentary Beyoncé Presents: Making The Gift, which drew 2.5 million viewers. Ten months after that — on July 31, 2020 — Disney and Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment released the accompanying, 90-minute visual album Black Is King exclusively on Disney+, with select clips made available as standalone music videos on YouTube.

The visual album spurred a whole cottage industry of hyper-engaged thinkpieces about Afro-diasporic representation and empowerment, while propelling the original 2019 soundtrack back into the top 10 of the Billboard 200 chart, 388 days after the album’s first single initially dropped. Even though Black Is King reportedly drew only 4% of Disney+’s user base on its opening weekend, Beyoncé is also reportedly still in talks with Disney for a $100 million deal spanning three major film projects — similar to her already-existing, $60 million, three-project deal with Netflix.

It’s not just Beyoncé’s seamless fusion of music, technology, celebrity and brand that helped propel The Lion King: The Gift and its subsequent creative derivatives into the cultural zeitgeist. Nor is it just that Beyoncé is earning revenue as a singer, songwriter, actress, producer, director, screenwriter and executive all at once across these projects.

It’s that Beyoncé’s 388-day album release cycle — which doesn’t even include the several months it likely took for Parkwood Entertainment to put the soundtrack together prior to release — exemplifies a major, underrated trend that feels almost contradictory to our TikTok-fueled industry hamster wheel: The slow death of traditional premiere culture, in favor of something more prolonged, more sustained, where the album release is just day one of a months- or even years-long marketing effort.

In this paradigm, musical projects are treated just like how we often treat human beings, whereby a temporary feature or name drop is ultimately not as revered as a long, fruitful life. Beyoncé “is a deity … it doesn’t matter that [what she does] impacts the marketplace right away,” Dylan Brewer, Senior Director of Marketing at Epic Records, tells me. “That’s not the point. Ultimately, [her work] has a deeper and longer impact on the music business overall.”

But this mindset is not limited just to the deities or the top 1% of celebrities. It also stands to serve any artist looking to build an audience and sustain their careers in 2020.

History: Maximizing day one

For decades, major recording artists have experimented with unconventional album release strategies to cut through the industry noise. Some of these strategies have endured and evolved; others have devolved.

Some examples:

But perhaps with the exception of the mega-sync, none of these kinds of strategies actually offer a playbook for expanding the lifespan of a given album. Instead, they’re still focused on maximizing traditional sales, chart placements and headline buzz on day one. Staying preoccupied with first-day or first-week impact runs the risk of missing the forest for the trees when it comes to a long-term creative vision.

2020: [Re]Release culture

Fast-forward to 2020, and the fatigue around release culture is real, especially amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, the music business was split on whether to push back or move up album release dates in response to people’s changing habits and economic hardships. But now, the pace only seems quicker than ever, with a daily, seemingly never-ending assault of albums, mixtapes, EPs, singles and TikTok memes that has turned the music industry into an amorphic sonic sludge.

“Ultimately, more artists aren’t super-precious about releasing their music,” says Brewer. “In the high-paced world of social media, if a song isn’t immediately successful, it’s okay. That reality comes with positives and negatives attached.”

Perhaps the biggest negative is that the notion of a “premiere economy” itself is dying with each passing day, and that its traditional infrastructure is largely unable — and, in the case of some blogs, unwilling — to support this deluge of noise.

In a popular Twitter thread from July 2020, music journalist Eli Enis unpacked how the previously “symbiotic relationship” between writers and publicists that premiere culture provided — writers could jump early on lesser-known artists, while publicists racked up clips for their press packages — was “premised on a number of conditions that are no longer relevant given the wildly different landscape of music journalism.” Examples of such differences include the shift to a freelance/gig economy (“there are very few staffed music writers left, and even fewer who’re able to cover small acts,” writes Enis), plus a wider shift from advertising to subscriptions for a new generation of music journalists, a model that doesn’t rely as much on web traffic to generate revenue.

“This might sound like a devastating blow to writers/publicists who’ve worked in the ‘premiere economy’ for years, but it’s actually just a return to the way music journalism worked for over 40 years prior: writers covering what they like/find interesting, not what’ll draw clicks,” writes Enis.

To combat the resulting flood of online sound, artists are becoming increasingly preoccupied not just with packaging their music for premieres, but also with repackaging their music several days or months after the fact, such that they stay top of mind for their fans and the wider news cycle after the album has had some time to marinate.

Examples of this strategy expand far beyond just TikTok memes:

The bigger strategic picture: Art as conversation

This shift from premiere culture to rerelease culture raises important questions not just about how music is released, or how its shelf life has been significantly extended in the streaming era, but also why it’s even released in the first place.

The harsh reality is that it’s difficult for an aspiring full-time artist today to release new music just for its own sake, and hope that audiences will find it. In the words of hip-hop producer and entrepreneur Kato on the Track: “To build a brand, you have to be a part of the conversation.”

Yes, an album can certainly still stand on its own as valuable art, and remains a powerful vessel for cohesive messages and creative visions in 2020. But in the wider context of an artist’s career, and in the fast-paced landscape of social media today, an album also serves as just one of many conversational tools in an artist’s toolbox.

“Artists must have a firm narrative compass, defined by some theory or question their career has to answer,” Kazz Laidlaw, who works in artist management at Equative Thinking, tells me. “The work and message have to be at least somewhat meaningful and symbolic too.” Brewer adds that “the best artists voice their opinions … in return, that art pushes the status quo.”

In the paradigm of artist branding as conversational branding, a release strategy then extends into a narrative strategy, which can span several months if not years after an album’s initial rollout. And treating music like the news cycle — something to be eaten up quickly — isn’t necessarily bad if you have a wider vision for fan engagement and creativity at play.

“To compare this to fashion, it’s like having a closet of clothes,” says Brewer. “Ideally, for the perfect closet, you want a mix of ready-to-wear fashion, meaning singles artists, and that high-fashion couture album.”

With fashion, as with music, there is value in both worlds. Drake is a prime example: The rapper is credited as a lead artist on 250 tracks across five studio albums, three compilations, three EPs and seven mixtapes. He’s also had 18 of his various types of releases reach No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and one in every eight releases he’s released as a lead artist or guested on as a featured performer has been a No. 1 hit.

But if you’re a fan of Drake, his “release cycle” is immaterial to your engagement with his music. Instead, apropos of streaming, you’re engaging with his latest music as a collective part of a larger, continual stream of his entire music collection. In general, “fans now become super-fans by engaging with artists as the background music to their lives,” notes Brewer. To use Brewer’s music-as-fashion closet analogy, Drake has proven to be able to produce an ideal blend of ready-made and haute couture.

And in a marketplace where the music is the message, the fan’s ability to appreciate good marketing — and the attention paid to satisfying how the fans in the market perceive themselves — becomes essential. “People want to be seen and heard more than ever in general, so I think when you [an artist] can let a fan know that you see them and hear them, they stan,” says Laidlaw. “They feel invested in being marketed to in new and interesting ways. and the more artists are intentional about that, the more they’re rewarded.” Again, in this mindset, “strategy” just boils down to mutual recognition and conversation among humans.

To bring it back to Beyoncé: While she is the latest in a line of singularly iconic musicians and influencers in pop culture, her strategy is arguably as instructive as it is novel. Insofar as control and sustainability are concerned, artists would do well to look past their art as just being art made for consumption, or as units for sale. In a streaming-first economy, music’s value is lower than it has ever been, and achieving peak value for a release commensurate to former industry highs has become much more difficult. And maintaining a strategy of multiple singles or playlist-length releases in the same, relatively short cycle is only a stopgap propping up what appears to be premiere culture’s last legs.

Instead, artists should consider the necessity of their art driving conversation and having pop-cultural impact, in a way that can financially sustain both themselves and the industry in which they work.

Black is King’s success shows that an artist can technically extend the campaign around an album through a 388-day cycle (and maybe more — we’ll have to wait and see). Of course, exclusive marketing and distribution partnerships with major film studios are able to give Beyoncé a leg up in this scenario. Other artists are following suit, partnering with media brands and video platforms to help narrate and package the story around their creative work (e.g. Amazon Studios’ partnerships with Lizzo and Janelle Monáe). In some cases, artists and labels are also acquiring media companies outright, as Warner Music Group just did with HipHopDX.

For smaller artists who aren’t able to access these kinds of opportunities, there are still many ways to experiment with the longevity and earning potential of their songs far beyond just streaming releases. With the existing tech platforms as well as emerging technologies available, the scope of these strategies remains as unknown as it is limitless, and the ongoing erosion of the premiere economy — whereby the first day is just the first step of the work — further propels us to explore.