Is the traditional album rollout gone?

Shorter waits for new music may be here to stay after 2020 flipped the traditional album release upside down. 

Taking it back to July 2020 (for a good reason, I promise), Taylor Swift announced that she would be dropping an album, folklore, at midnight. The music world and practically all of Twitter lit up at the surprise, everyone only having mere hours to prepare for a new album from music’s top songstress. Swift’s announcement for folklore’s sister album, evermore, was delivered the same way in December. Megan Thee Stallion announced her debut album Good News on November 12, for it to be released about a week later on November 20, and Ariana Grande followed a similar week’s notice timeline for Positions. 

So has the traditional multi-month album release been abandoned?

A typical album rollout can mean weeks of waiting. First comes the single, then possibly another, before the announcement of an album title and drop date that may be a month or two away. 

There are multiple factors that play into the shortening of the album announcement to the release period as of recently. Firstly, there’s also so much entertainment media! That new movie your friend recommended to you on Netflix, a show that you’ve always wanted to see, the inevitable social media scrolling… It’s hard (for me at least) to add something new to my ever-growing watch list. 

Next, we are online more than ever with our classes, our news consumption, and our communication with friends and family. We are inundated with media and news each day. An album or show has to be interesting enough for us to make the decision to spend more time online consuming it over something else or to take time offline. 

Finally, we want new media sooner rather than later. An album itself is more likely to grab our attention than teasers to an album that comes out in a few months. With less time between announcement and release, an artist won’t have to keep up with as much preview or filler content about the album either. Let alone the fact that people can be forgetful (I know that I am now that my courses are online), and might not remember that an album is coming out two months from now. It’s more likely to stick in a listener’s mind if they hear about the album closer to the release actually happening. 

Most of all, why I think the quick album drop is here to stay is because it has proven itself successful, at least for larger artists. Megan Thee Stallion’s Good News debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, and No. 2 on the all-genre Billboard 200, for example. 

Here’s to seeing if the shorter album rollout is here to stay and how it will impact when we hear new music from our favorite artists!