Last night if you’re in tune with anything that happens in the music world you’re aware that Beyoncé, hereto known as Queen Bey, dropped an album out of thin air and surprised the hell out of everyone. It prompted an absolute shit storm of people freaking out, myself included. I didn’t freak out for the music, but instead for the brilliance of the marketing. These days it’s damn near impossible to keep anything secret and to think of all the people that had to be involved in this and all had to keep their mouths shut is utterly impossible, but it happened.
She made 17 videos, 14 songs, put it on sale exclusively on iTunes for $15.99 and didn’t say a word. Nor did Frank Ocean, Drake, Jay-Z, Blue Ivy, any of the producers, publicists, anyone at iTunes, any marketing specialists that could’ve hyped, then overhyped this album. Not a single soul let the cat out the bag and now we have a 1% game changer.
If you don’t know what I mean by 1% game changer I’ll deftly explain. This is not a strategy that just anyone could pull off. Lissie or Haim or even the aforementioned Frank Ocean could not pull this off. They don’t have the clout yet. You know who can pull this off? Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Kanye West and maybe a handful of others. Those artists with the biggest followings and portfolios could make this happen but not even superstars like Kings of Leon could make an album appear out of nowhere and have the success this album is going to have.
Game changer is an overused phrase (that I overused earlier in this piece), because it implies that one certain act is going to change the way things are done in the future. This won’t change the game as a whole, but it’ll certainly be another idea for the top 1% of musicians to think about in the future. Perhaps it isn’t a game changer at all, perhaps only Queen Bey could’ve made this happen.
If you’re interested in seeing the first video to the new album follow this link for Beyonce featuring Drake on “Mine” a fantastic song. http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/videos/id.15063/title.beyonce-f-drake-mine
