Surprise album
"[8] 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 first album Channel Orange one week earlier than its publicized release date.
[20] Beyoncé later explained that her intent was to reinstate the idea of an album release as a significant, exciting event that had lost meaning in the face of hype created around singles.
[21] 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.
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.
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.
[1][24] 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".
[5] 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 the next day independently, both as Apple Music exclusives.
[25] By 2019, Vulture and The Music Network published editorial articles questioning if the surprise album release format had peaked in popularity and effectiveness.
They start seeing the track list and they know it's coming, I feel like, my best shot to avoid it is just to drop it, instead of people thinking to themselves like 'if he got this person on the album, I ain't f**king with it.'
[27] 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.
[29] 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.
[31] 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".
[36] David Sackllah of Consequence of Sound noted that while many major artists had attempted a surprise release, few had matched or surpassed the level of excitement of In Rainbows.
But even when the phrase is used more precisely, it's becoming a bit hollow; we're living through a deluge of albums — even something as long promised as Rihanna's Anti — that lay claim to that trendy term 'surprise,' but have, like Lemonade, given us a lot of hints that they were coming.
