Breaking Bad. Orange Is the New Black. Beyoncé.
We covered last week how Beyoncé’s surprise release of her self titled album undermined existing marketing paradigms. But Beyoncé may have also created a blueprint for the future of profitable album releases. According to this MTV article by Craig Flaster, the record breaking success of Beyoncé has more in common with House of Cards than Yeezus. Beyoncé, after all, was billed as a “visual album” and came with 17 music videos. And where there are videos, people will binge-watch.
Binge-watching is as much part of the modern day human experience as retweeting or liking Facebook statuses. This is the nerve that Beyoncé hit. It’s funny how people will either watch a six second GIF or six hours of TV shows, with no middle ground. It’s like a Houston Rockets shot chart in real life, with us trying to be entertained in the most efficient way. Our viewing habits are either shooting 3’s or dunking. Mid-range jumpers, those 30 minute weekly episodes that were once so fundamental, lead to Twitter obscurity.
:: Answer our Quora question and tell us what artist has the most binge-watchable music videos?.
iTunes Exclusivity – The X-Factor
Leaks have arguably become the biggest part of an album’s release. Downloading an album two weeks before it comes out, and tweeting “this shit is a classic” having listened to two songs is The Event. But trending topics don’t add up to record sales, especially for an album that the public can’t even purchase.
iTunes’ first week digital exclusivity for Beyoncé not only prevented Leak Night on Twitter, but also controlled the way it was consumed by forcing fans to purchase the entire album. Without any singles, each video became its own episode, and each episode adding to the larger narrative of Beyoncé. Record sales, a throwback to the “good old days” when albums were albums, digital and artistic innovation – everyone gets what they want (except for Target and Amazon). This isn’t Netflix, this isn’t music – this is exclusive binge-watching.
2 For the Visual Music Future
Beyoncé set a high standard for future visual albums, using more than 16 directors, with settings from Cuba to Brooklyn. While many artists don’t have the financial backing of Beyoncé to create this ambitious a project, it’s not impossible.
Besides, Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city is already a movie. The album’s coming of age story is a genre as old as narrative itself. In that sense, good kid, m.A.A.d. city has as much in common with Samm in Freaks and Geeks (available for binge-watching on Netflix) as Killer Mike’s R.A.P. Music that came out the same year (which was cinematic in its own way). Importantly, the album, like Beyoncé, was successful – it debuted at #1 on the Billboard Charts, and eventually went platinum.
:: Receive Bomani’s Blog, Videos, and Podcast. Subscribe to The Email Jones.
Whereas good kid, m.A.A.d. city is about a narrator coming to terms with the real world, Action Bronson’s Blue Chips 2 is the hurlyburly of internet life thrown against the wall. The mixtape has characters, with Bronson the unreliable narrator, traveling through New York City and 80s music with sidekick Big Body Bes. Set in an expansive city, with a dark, ugly humor finding solace in small truths, Blue Chips 2 was the mixtape season 2 of Eastbound and Down (available for binge-watching on HBO Go).
Maybe I was asking the wrong questions about music all along. I was in high school when Napster was at its peak; then people moved onto Soulseek by the time I entered college. After that, blogs had mp3s…and there were messageboards…and somewhere along the way, we stopped caring. The physical music product, whether CDs or records, was once a symbol that organized us into social groups. TV shows never a badge of cool like listening to underground bands that no one heard of. Television was for the water cooler. Then social media became the water cooler, and we had to watch The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, and Boardwalk Empire or we couldn’t log onto Facebook or Twitter the entire week.
Even today, conversations begin “Have you seen Season (insert number here) of (insert show here)?” My friend threw a guitar at me when I spoiled who got elected the mayor of Baltimore in season 4 of The Wire, and that was like 5 years after the show had gone off air (I didn’t say anything about Bodie though). This is how Beyoncé subtly changed the music conversation – a conversation we paid $15.99 to be apart of.
For one week in the middle of December, downloading an album felt important. We know that it’s lack of marketing was a significant event for marketing, but the entire package of Beyoncé may have also created a middle ground between digital music and the way people consume. In the 80s, video killed the radio star. But in the 2013, videos could be the radio star’s salvation. And we’ll watch, on our couch, for hours at a time.
