Why Albums Drop and Movies Launch

For this week’s Infinite Scroll column, Brady Brickner-Wood is filling in for Kyle Chayka.

In the summer of 2007, Kanye West and 50 Cent were embroiled in a high-wattage—and highly manufactured—promotional showdown. Both rappers had albums dropping on the same day in September and, to boost their respective first-week sales, were squaring off in as many venues as possible. They stood toe-to-toe, like boxers, onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards; they mean-mugged each other on the cover of Rolling Stone; they sat for a joint interview as part of a BET special titled “Kanye West vs. 50 Cent: The Clash of the Titans.” 50 Cent played the villain, belittling his opponent and threatening to retire if he didn’t sell more units, whereas West played the bashful little brother, a pink-polo-wearing whiz kid whose ambitions transcended the back-and-forth, but who still gladly participated in the pageantry. The rest, of course, is history. West’s “Graduation” was a sensation, selling nearly a million copies in its first week and débuting atop the Billboard charts. 50 Cent sold around seven hundred thousand copies and came in at No. 2, though the album effectively ended his run as a chart-topping solo artist. West’s victory marked a major shift in mainstream hip-hop—Glock-toting gangsta rap was out, euphoric genre-blending was in—but the face-off between West and 50 Cent may be most remembered as one of the last album-promotional events of its kind. (Combined, the albums became the highest-selling No. 1 and 2 records in the SoundScan era.) The platform-driven internet, as we know it, was beginning to take shape, and with it a shifting media landscape that made marketing albums a much different, and more difficult, enterprise.

Last week, A$AP Rocky released “Don’t Be Dumb,” his first studio album in almost eight years, to instant streaming success, but limited cultural conversation. This wasn’t for lack of effort: Rocky has spent more than a year aggressively promoting the project, taking a traditionalist’s approach to its rollout. He sat with the Times for an interview and performed on “Saturday Night Live.” He recruited the filmmaker Tim Burton to design the cover art and tapped Winona Ryder to star in the music video for the album’s lead single. Oh, and have you heard he wrote a diss track about everyone’s favorite punching bag, Drake? Despite the theatrics, the album arrived as most albums these days tend to: an anticlimactic drop in an ocean overflowing with too much content. This is not to say that “Don’t Be Dumb” won’t perform well; it is projected to achieve a No. 1 chart position. But will the record capture the Zeitgeist? Will it survive the fast-moving content cycle or fade into memory? Will Rocky’s name be on the lips of your parents, your colleagues, the kids on the train? It’s possible—Rocky is an A-list star, with a high-profile marriage to Rihanna and a budding acting career. (Last year, he appeared alongside Denzel Washington, in “Highest 2 Lowest,” and Rose Byrne, in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.”) But I’d bet that “Don’t Be Dumb,” which lacks a true hit song or a narrative strong enough to satiate the attention economy’s endless appetite, goes the way of most contemporary blockbuster albums. Here for a cup of coffee, gone before dinner.

It’s not just Rocky struggling to drum up the requisite attention for a big-budget album. The Kid Laroi—a major-label darling who has seemed to be on the cusp of pop stardom for years—released a record earlier this month, “Before I Forget,” to tepid critical reception and only modest commercial success. Not even two weeks since it came out, the album seems destined to be discarded as an ineffectual data dump; some songs will put up big streaming numbers, most won’t, and, in a few months, when Laroi’s label inevitably re-releases the project as a deluxe edition, the record will receive another notoriety bump before once again disappearing from the discourse. Similar to “Don’t Be Dumb,” “Before I Forget” lacks a definitive hit and a compelling-enough story line, leaving little incentive to consume the album in full. (Unless, of course, one is extremely invested in Laroi’s recent breakup with the fellow pop star Tate McRae.) Even for a beloved rapper like J. Cole, who’s been teasing his forthcoming album, “The Fall-Off,” for several years and who just last week announced an official release date, it remains unclear whether he can create stakes high enough, and at a large enough scale, to elevate his record into the category of an event.

A key reason why it’s now more complicated to promote an album than, say, a theatrically released film, is the ephemeral, immaterial nature of contemporary music consumption. One no longer purchases an album—one purchases a subscription service that grants access to basically every album and song ever made. When a new album comes out, a representative single is featured on an editorial or algorithmicized playlist alongside a hundred other new songs. If a listener likes what she hears, she can further explore a record, then relegate personal favorites into her own customized playlist, turning the album into a menu instead of a meal. And the whiplash is unforgiving: a week later, a new slate of albums and singles are released and replace the previous week’s playlist entries. (This is why the surprise drop—a popular release strategy in the early-to-mid twenty-tens—no longer serves as an event-making moment for many musicians; in the streaming era, it’s too easy for any album to get lost in the chaos of Spotify’s “New Music Friday.”) Some artists can supersede this cycle, but they are the exception, not the rule. Taylor Swift’s albums have come to dominate the culture—and the charts—through a savvy, if not extreme, strategy. In the months after releasing an album, Swift announces dozens of vinyl, CD, and cassette variations, pairing merch drops with whatever new physical media she’s selling. Drake, on the other hand, has found success in this new media economy by embracing its built-in transience, flooding the market with a torrent of material, whether on Twitch streams or via short-form social-media clips. It’s notable, though, that both Swift and Drake established their core fan bases at a time when the album format still held audiences at attention—when purchasing a record meant actually paying for it and, thus, consuming the thing in full, again and again, whether you loved it or not.