DROP THE FUCKING ALBUM

In  this new digital age of content, music, and media it can be easy to be left behind. There are so many new artists and so many new albums that drop in one season. This makes it almost impossible to consume it all, let a lone choose an album of the year. Even more is the fact that there are so many variations of a release such as; singles, EP, LP, album, mixtape, compilation, greatest hits, and most recently playlist. And with all these variations and new content being dropped it's easy to see how an artist can feel the pressure to release new music. This has been even more of a concern now that artists now can push a button and have content pushed out to millions of listeners. But what happens if the pressure is too much and that album you promised and have been promoting for 3 months gets pushed back? Here's a few examples:

With the recent release of "Friday on Elm Street" which is a joint-collab project by Fabolous (who else spelled that out in their head?) and Jadakiss which dropped on November 17, 2017. All together it was an OK project. I say OK because this project was a long time coming that Fabolous and Jadakiss had been promoting to their fans since February 29, 2016. In the tape Fabolous takes on the persona of Freddy Krueger from the scary movies, while Jadakiss takes on the persona of Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th movies. Together Fabolous and Jadakiss come together to form a group that is out to murder their competition in only the way that Freddy and Jason can. But what's weird about the theme of this tape is that this has a Freddy and Jason theme which would suggest an October most notably Halloween release. But to everyone's surprise this was a mid-November release which felt out of place. And in my opinion the hype of this album combined with the Halloween theme but the album not dopping til November led to this album not being as big as it should of been. It was here 1 week and just another album ever since.  ​

But this isn't always the case. Lil Wayne throughout his career has seen this play both to his advantage as well as his disadvantage. With the release of Tha Carter 3 Lil Wayne had started promoting this  album in mid-2007 this was before an album leak kept him from releasing the real album until June 10, 2008, over a year later. But to Lil Wayne's surprise the album actually surpassed the expectations of anyone and Tha Carter 3 became an instant classic with Grammy nominations as well as selling over a millions copies in its first week. Many thought Wayne could do no wrong. Until the same delay of Wanye's next album Tha Carter IV which he began promoting in late 2008 but did not drop until July 2011, almost 3 years after it's initial promotion. Argubably the album did sale over 900,000 but musically it didn't sound like a cohesive album, mostly attributed to the numerous album release date push backs. And let's not even talk about Tha Carter V, which has yet to be released even after numerous promises and lawsuits.

Dr. Dre after the commercial success of his album Chronic 2001 was poised to drop another hot album called Detox. But for years the album never came. And for years the hype and speculation of this album grew so big that the myth of the album had far outgrown the actual album. Dr. Dre knew that no album no project that he could drop called Detox would ever live up to the myth or the hype. So what did he do? He dropped Compton which was an album inspired by the Biopic movie Compton which took the pressure off Dre. So much that he could actually drop another album without anyone mumuring the words Detox, other than a few super fans and blogs.

​So what does this all mean in the end? Drop an album. No hype. No advertising. Artists like Beyonce' and Drake have seen this strategy work in their favor, both having millions of copies sold in the first week's release of an album with no hype at all. Kanye has even been known to drop an album and then update it on the fly, doing subtle adjustments on an album that had already dropped. Just like any art piece, to an artist the piece is never finished and with the evolution of music streaming an artist can keep working on their masterpiece as long as they want to. But no matter what you do. DROP THE FUCKING ALBUM...