Beyoncé fans were given a real surprise this Thursday
December 12th. With no
warning, no promotions of any kind, and no press, she released a 14-track album
with a video for each song. No one
outside of her team knew about this album. Fans immediately went to social
media to express their shock and excitement. Countless numbers of memes were
made quickly and before you knew it, the album titled “Beyoncé” debuted at
number one with sales over 430,000 in just a little over a day. It’s projected
that she’ll quickly reach over 600,000 albums sold. 
According to Singersroom,
the “Beyoncé” album has exceeded the first week sales of her previous three
albums, “Bday,” “I Am Sasha…Fierce,” and “4.” As of right now, the album is
only available on iTunes with no mention of a release date to any other
distributors besides iTunes. Billboard predicts that Beyoncé could easily take
Taylor Swift’s spot as the biggest debuting album for a female artist.
The album features songs including “Drunk in Love” featuring
husband Jay-Z, “Mine” featuring Drake, and “Blue.”
The Boston
Globe calls this technique of releasing an album a “stroke of marketing
genius.” The album became the news story of the day, therefore giving her free
promotion and marketing. With all the recent changes of the music industry
because of social media, the Internet, digital music, and smartphones, Beyoncé
and her team saw that it would be a good idea to try something different and
creative. This album release strategy certainly worked out well for Beyoncé.
The fact that she created a video for each of the 14 songs was also affective
and different. Not many artists could pull something like this off. There are
artists who promote albums that are not as popular as this one. I wonder if
other artists will try something like this in the future.
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