10 Wild Album Release Stunts, From U2 to Beyonce to Kanye West

Record stores were hanging on by the tips of their fingernails in 2007 when Radiohead came along and essentially pushed them into oblivion. Their form of destruction came in a post by Jonny Greenwood to Radiohead’s website on September 30. “Hello everyone,” he wrote. “Well, the new album is finished, and it’s coming out in 10 days; we’ve called it In Rainbows. Love from us all.”

It included a link to a website where fans learned they could pay anything they wanted for an MP3 version of the album, including absolutely nothing. They could also pony up and buy a physical album along with a bonus disc of eight additional tracks. No matter what they did, it didn’t involve a trip to the Virgin Megastore or Tower Records. The gambit was a huge success that provided a framework for many other acts to follow, even if some were critical of Radiohead for offering fans a compressed version of the LP as a download as opposed to a high-res file.

Michael Jackson knew he had to make a big statement to win back fans following the child sex abuse allegations that plagued him during the Dangerous tour. He decided to release a double album that contained his biggest hits on one disc, and an entirely new album on the second. To promote HIStory: Past, Present, and Future and the accompanying tour, 30-foot, 20,000-pound Michael Jackson statues were placed all across the globe, including on the River Thames in London and Alexanderplatz in Berlin.

There was also a four-minute teaser video that presents Jackson as a benevolent dictator/demigod who commands an army of infinite soldiers, culminating with an unveiling of the statue. This created quite a bit of interest in the album, and singles like “Scream” and “You Are Not Alone” were hits. But it was still a disappointment compared to his previous three albums, and marked the start of a significant career decline for Jackson.

Before he went “death con 3” against Jewish people and released a song called “Heil Hitler,” Kanye West (now known as Ye) still had quite a bit of goodwill with the music industry and the general public. That’s why he was able to book Madison Square Garden on February 11, 2016, for a premiere party for The Life of Pablo that doubled as a fashion show for his Yeezy clothing line. It featured a small army of models standing on two giant cubes, the album blaring at punishing volume, and countless people watching the livestream.

And once the album premiered on Tidal, he continued to tweak it in the days and weeks that followed. There was no real precedent in music history of treating an album like a living work of art that changed without warning, and fans did their best to chronicle the minute alterations. In many ways, this was Ye at the peak of his powers. Everything that followed was a gradual decline, even if he’s again playing stadiums.

It’s very easy to bash U2 for gifting every iPhone user on the planet their 2014 album Songs of Innocence. But take a step back and try to look at it from their perspective. Record stores were dead at this point, music had moved entirely online, they had tremendous success marketing their 2004 single “Vertigo” through an iPod commercial, and it felt like a great way to share their work with the widest possible audience, costing every listener absolutely nothing.

But they didn’t really think it through. U2 weren’t exactly at the zenith of their popularity in 2014, Songs of Innocence isn’t exactly Achtung Baby or War in terms of quality or innovation, “everyone with an iPhone” is a lot of people, and many of them simply had no interest in a new U2 album. The blowback was brutal, and they’ve yet to fully recover from the reputational damage. (Personally, we think the whole thing was incredibly overblown. We’re psyched to hear their upcoming album. Just don’t expect to get it for free on your phone. They’ve learned their lesson.)

Daft Punk’s 2006 performance at Coachella may be the single most legendary set in the history of the festival. And nearly every year that followed, breathless “Daft Punk are coming back to Coachella!” rumors spread without any payoff. But in 2013, they used the Coachella stage to unveil a two-minute trailer for their upcoming album Random Access Memories and leadoff single “Get Lucky.”

This was the exact audience they wanted to excite, and the gambit paid off better than they could have expected. Random Access Memories sold millions of copies worldwide, scooped up Grammys, and “Get Lucky” became one of the biggest songs of the year. And they did all of this without a tour or any sort of traditional press campaign.

Broadly speaking, if you find a USB flash drive in a bathroom stall, it’s best to leave it there. There’s no telling what nightmares await, legal or otherwise, if you upload the data to your computer. But for a very select few who saw Nine Inch Nails on their 2007 European tour and took home the flash drives they found in the bathrooms, the payoff was enormous: high-quality MP3s of songs from NIN’s upcoming LP Year Zero. Before long, they were spreading across the internet.

The RIAA didn’t love this method of album promotion, which also included a secret website and an alternate reality game, but Trent Reznor didn’t care. “The USB drive was simply a mechanism of leaking the music and data we wanted out there,” he told the Guardian. “The medium of the CD is outdated and irrelevant. It’s really painfully obvious what people want — DRM-free music they can do what they want with. If the greedy record industry would embrace that concept I truly think people would pay for music and consume more of it.”

On December 13, 2013, at exactly midnight, Beyoncé sent shockwaves through her fan community and the music industry by dropping her self-titled album onto iTunes, along with videos for all 14 tracks, without any warning. Fans who happened to be awake stayed up all night gorging on the new material, while others woke up to the stunning news. Either way, the gambit created a tidal wave of attention that shot the album to the #1 spot all over the globe. In its first three days alone, it sold over 617,000 copies.

It was proof you didn’t need hidden flash drives, ice blocks, or arena fashion shows to promote an album. Sometimes you can simply keep a really big secret, spend months planning, and then execute with the push of a button.

Months before Beyoncé surprised the world with her album, David Bowie pulled off an even bigger feat by celebrating his 66th birthday with the stunning news that he’d spent the past two years secretly making an album in New York City that he was finally ready to share with the world. “I didn’t even tell my kids who was working here,” said Steve Rosenthal, owner of the downtown studio Magic Shop where Bowie recorded the LP. “Nobody.”

Bowie didn’t grant a single interview to promote The Next Day, and he didn’t perform live or even appear in public. This anti-PR campaign was very effective in drumming up interest in the album and the nostalgic leadoff single “Where Are We Now?” All throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Bowie worked incessantly to sell the world on his new music. It wasn’t until the end of his life that he discovered the best way to do that is to simply vanish.

Most musical acts aspire to sell as many albums as possible. But the Wu-Tang Clan took the polar opposite approach in 2015 when they recorded a double album of new material, pressed a single copy, deleted the master file, stored it in a secret vault in Mexico, and auctioned it off to the highest bidder.

“The music industry is in crisis,” they wrote. “The intrinsic value of music has been reduced to zero. Contemporary art is worth millions by virtue of its exclusivity … By adopting a 400-year-old Renaissance-style approach to music, offering it as a commissioned commodity and allowing it to take a similar trajectory from creation to exhibition to sale … we hope to inspire and intensify urgent debates about the future of music.”

Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli bought the album for $2 million. After he went to prison for securities fraud, his assets were seized, and the album was sold for $2.2 million by a Hong Kong-based entity. In 2021, they sold it for $4 million to an NFT corporation. Snippets and low-quality rips have been heard by the public, but few people have ever heard the entire thing.

In 2007, Kanye West’s career was on the rise, and 50 Cent’s career was in decline. And for a brief moment, they essentially had comparable levels of fame. That’s why it made sense for them to both drop their new albums on the same day, which happened to be the sixth anniversary of 9/11, and work together to promote the competition for the top of the Billboard album chart. They even posed for a dual Rolling Stone cover.

50 Cent claimed that if Kanye outsold him, he’d retire from the music industry. But when Kanye easily bested him — 2.1 million to 1.3 million — 50 Cent backed away from that pledge. This was still the moment when Kanye emerged as the biggest name in hip-hop, and Curtis is largely remembered as the album that Kanye outsold.