<\/p>\n
For this week\u2019s Infinite Scroll column, Brady Brickner-Wood is filling in for Kyle Chayka.<\/em><\/p>\n In the summer of 2007, Kanye West and 50 Cent were embroiled in a high-wattage\u2014and highly manufactured\u2014promotional 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;<\/em> they sat for a joint interview as part of a BET special titled \u201cKanye West vs. 50 Cent: The Clash of the Titans.\u201d 50 Cent played the villain, belittling his opponent and threatening to retire if he didn\u2019t 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\u2019s \u201cGraduation\u201d was a sensation, selling nearly a million copies in its first week and d\u00e9buting atop the Billboard<\/em> 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\u2019s victory marked a major shift in mainstream hip-hop\u2014Glock-toting gangsta rap was out, euphoric genre-blending was in\u2014but 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.<\/p>\n Last week, A$AP Rocky released \u201cDon\u2019t Be Dumb,\u201d his first studio album in almost eight years, to instant streaming success, but limited cultural conversation. This wasn\u2019t for lack of effort: Rocky has spent more than a year aggressively promoting the project, taking a traditionalist\u2019s approach to its rollout. He sat with the Times<\/em> for an interview<\/a> and performed on \u201cSaturday Night Live.\u201d He recruited the filmmaker Tim Burton to design the cover art and tapped Winona Ryder to star in the music video for the album\u2019s lead single. Oh, and have you heard he wrote a diss track about everyone\u2019s favorite punching bag, Drake<\/em><\/a>? 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 \u201cDon\u2019t Be Dumb\u201d won\u2019t 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\u2019s name be on the lips of your parents, your colleagues, the kids on the train? It\u2019s possible\u2014Rocky 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 \u201cHighest 2 Lowest<\/a>,\u201d and Rose Byrne, in \u201cIf I Had Legs I\u2019d Kick You<\/a>.\u201d) But I\u2019d bet that \u201cDon\u2019t Be Dumb,\u201d which lacks a true hit song or a narrative strong enough to satiate the attention economy\u2019s endless appetite, goes the way of most contemporary blockbuster albums. Here for a cup of coffee, gone before dinner.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just Rocky struggling to drum up the requisite attention for a big-budget album. The Kid Laroi\u2014a major-label darling who has seemed to be on the cusp of pop stardom for years\u2014released a record earlier this month, \u201cBefore I Forget,\u201d 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\u2019t, and, in a few months, when Laroi\u2019s 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 \u201cDon\u2019t Be Dumb,\u201d \u201cBefore I Forget\u201d 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\u2019s recent breakup with the fellow pop star Tate McRae.) Even for a beloved rapper like J. Cole, who\u2019s been teasing his forthcoming album, \u201cThe Fall-Off,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n A key reason why it\u2019s 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\u2014one 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\u2019s playlist entries. (This is why the surprise drop\u2014a popular release strategy in the early-to-mid twenty-tens\u2014no longer serves as an event-making moment for many musicians; in the streaming era, it\u2019s too easy for any album to get lost in the chaos of Spotify\u2019s \u201cNew Music Friday.\u201d) Some artists can supersede this cycle, but they are the exception, not the rule. Taylor Swift\u2019s albums have come to dominate the culture\u2014and the charts\u2014through 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\u2019s 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\u2019s notable, though, that both Swift and Drake established their core fan bases at a time when the album format still held audiences at attention\u2014when purchasing a record meant actually paying for it and, thus, consuming the thing in full, again and again, whether you loved it or not.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newyorker.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For this week\u2019s 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\u2014and highly manufactured\u2014promotional 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2245019,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[22162,21800,22821,349136],"class_list":["post-2245018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-internet","tag-music","tag-spotify","tag-streaming-platforms"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Why-Albums-Drop-and-Movies-Launch.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2245018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2245018"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2245018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2245020,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2245018\/revisions\/2245020"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2245019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2245018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2245018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2245018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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