Surprise album

Radiohead on tour for their 2007 surprise album In Rainbows

The English rock band Radiohead's 2007 studio album In Rainbows is often credited as the first surprise album.[2][1][3][4] The release was announced on the band's blog ten days prior, which DIY magazine describes as "a pretty unexpected move" at the time.[1] Shortly after the release, Radiohead's bassist Colin Greenwood stated the band had several motivations behind the album's release format, including the increased popularity of the internet as a tool for discovering music, frustrations with the traditional release and promotion format, the freedom of not being signed to a record label at the time, a desire to do something special and unique, and an interest in broadcasting their music directly to listeners globally at the same time.[5] It also served as a countermeasure to Internet leaks of albums, which had become prevalent at the time.[1] In Rainbows is also credited for starting the pay-what-you-want model.[4]

After ending a tumultuous relationship with Interscope Records in 2007, Nine Inch Nails independently released Ghosts I–IV and The Slip in 2008. Both were released for free (with the option to purchase higher-quality digital or physical editions) and were released under a Creative Commons license to allow fans the ability to edit and remix the new music as they desired.[6] Nine Inch Nails manager Jim Guerinot said the idea to release the albums without prior announcement was to pre-empt a leak and control the marketing, stating: "Internet searches peak around the leak, not around the single or the album. By the time the album comes out, it's done."[7]

In 2011, American rappers Jay-Z and Kanye West advertised false release dates for their collaborative album Watch the Throne, in part an effort to pre-empt leaks. This strategy inspired the singer Frank Ocean to surprise-release his second album Channel Orange one week earlier than its publicized release date.[8]

Beyoncé and Jay-Z (in 2009), the most popular implementers of the release strategy

Jay-Z and American singer Beyoncé are often credited with mastering the release strategy through multiple solo and collaborative releases, beginning with the latter's 2013 self-titled album Beyoncé. Harley Brown of Vulture wrote, "Ever since Beyoncé's self-titled visual album appeared like a Christmas miracle on the iTunes store at midnight on a Thursday in December of 2013, the rules for how to release a record were rewritten literally overnight."[9] According to Vulture writer Lindsey Zoladz, the release was made possible by, "presumably, an entire rain forest's worth of nondisclosure agreements".[10] The singer would also adapt the release format for her follow-up album Lemonade in 2016. Jay-Z surprise released his 2017 album 4:44, and the following year the couple surprise released the collaborative album Everything Is Love as The Carters.[1]

By the mid 2010s, the music industry had entered what Zoladz called the "surprise-album era". While Beyoncé's name became synonymous with surprise albums, subsequent acts used the strategy in different ways. For instance, certain artists unexpectedly released an album, or a selection of tracks, that had been announced at an earlier date in an effort to outpace Internet leaks, as in 2015 with Björk's Vulnicura, Madonna's Rebel Heart, and Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly.[10]

Some surprise albums created controversy. In 2014, Irish rock band U2 partnered with Apple Inc. to release their thirteenth studio album Songs of Innocence through the iTunes Store at no cost to half a billion people. The album was automatically added to users' music libraries in iTunes, which for those with automatic downloads enabled, resulted in an unprompted download of the album to their electronic devices. Many users did not want the album and several months after the release were frustrated that they could not delete the album from their devices.[1][11] David Sackllah of Consequence of Sound noted that "U2 and Apple deserve credit for thinking ambitiously, but they overestimated the band's relevance with fans, and many felt like the automatic download constituted an invasion of privacy."[4]

In 2016, American R&B singer Frank Ocean surprised released his visual album Endless, to complete his contract with Def Jam, and quickly followed up with Blonde a few days later independently, both as Apple Music exclusives. The act of Frank Ocean leaving Def Jam called into question surprise albums and exclusive digital releases. An anonymous Def Jam employee said to Buzzfeed at the time, "Our view is that giving exclusives to individual streaming platforms for long periods of time is not good for the artist, it's not good for the fans, and it limits the commercial opportunity for everybody involved."[12] By 2019, Vulture and The Music Network published editorial articles questioning if the surprise album release format had peaked in popularity and effectiveness.[3][9]

In 2020, American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift's eighth studio album, Folklore, was released with less than 24 hours notice to much surprise among listeners and the music industry.[13] The record was created in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, under total secrecy; Republic Records, Swift's record label, were let known about the project only a few hours before its launch.[14] According to Elias Leight of Rolling Stone, while Swift had preferred traditional album-release cycles and was "a rare holdout" among major recording artists, Folklore's surprise release acknowledged that "the new class of winners release music steadily and adapt quickly to capitalize on sudden flashpoints, rather than trying to force those flashpoints to happen on any sort of regular, preordained schedule. If music industry success used to be all about muscle, now it's more about speed."[15] Five months later, Swift surprise-released her ninth studio album, Evermore, which she dubbed as Folklore's "sister" project.[16] Vulture stated that the news of another surprise album from Swift "came as a major shock", as she has been "the industry's most prominent loyalist to the pop-album rollout", who turns her carefully planned releases into "an art of their own".[17]