The GIF you see above came through my Twitter feed around 10:30 last night. It landed about an hour after I got word that Beyoncé had unexpectedly dropped a brand-spankin'-new "visual album" – the cool way of saying an album that comes with videos – on iTunes and realized we, the internet, were having a moment. In the ensuing hours, social media was talking about Beyoncé and nothing but Beyoncé. Tweets and Tumbls were omnipresent as her videos were seemingly GIF'd in real time and everyone went nuts on Facebook. Perhaps this says more about the people I follow than the world at large, but it seemed like Bey was out to break the internet.
That didn’t happen, of course – you're reading this on the internet after all. But Beyoncé did wreak some serious havoc. Mentions of her Bey-ness on Twitter hit somewhere between 500,000 and 1.2 million in the hours after Beyoncé landed. iTunes reportedly crashed as people rushed to download the album in a frantic "shut up and take my money!" frenzy. It sold 80,000 copies in three hours. Following Beyoncé hashtags on Twitter and Tumblr became an impossible-to-follow flow of "omg" and "Can't wait to tell my kids about the day Beyoncé dropped 'Beyoncé.'"
It was nuts. It was like when Radiohead released In Rainbows, except it had a set price of $15.99. It was also genius.
By not promoting her album at all – no singles, no teaser videos, no street teams wheat-pasting in major cities – she made its release a surprise happening. Had we not just published our best music moments of 2013, this would've definitely made the list. She announced the album, posted a "Surprise!" on Instagram and gave fans enough material to keep them busy for days. Then she dropped the mic. Thanks to whatever death-to-snitches plan she had in place, word of the album never got out and nothing leaked. Even the NSA can't keep a secret that well. In the annals of minimal-marketing marketing, it was a pretty smart move, particularly for an artist who is obsessively discussed on social media but engages with it selectively. (She has pretty active Tumblr and Instagram accounts, but hasn't tweeted to her 13 million followers since August.)
Of course, this wouldn't work for every artist. Only someone with albums as highly anticipated as Beyoncé's can do this. Like her husband Jay Z, who can pretty much guarantee one million people will download his album via a Samsung app, she knows people are going to find her record no matter how she promotes it. So why not let everyone else spread the gospel for you? Or, as one smart tweet put it, "Beyoncé doesn't need publicity. Publicity needs Beyoncé." It also doesn't hurt that the album, with its 14 songs and 17 videos, is a brilliant collection of music that also happens to have Easter eggs like a Big Lebowski line in French and someone actually saying the word "feminist" on what is sure to be one of the biggest pop records of the year.
This isn't necessarily the future of album releases for major artists, but for someone like Beyoncé it might be the smartest way to do an album release. Whereas most artists constantly self-promote on social media, Beyoncé is using fever-pitch level of interest in Beyoncé to do the promoting for her. She didn't put piles of pre-release teasers on YouTube; she released the album and let everyone else tease it for her. She is eating vegan cupcakes while you tweet and Tumbl and do the work other artists pay marketing people millions of dollars to do. It's brilliant. When people are talking about you anyway, give them something to talk about. This piece and the fact that you're reading it? QED. For further proof that it worked, look no further than Katy Perry – one of the many pop princesses Beyoncé is seen sweeping off of the table in the GIF above.
"Don't talk to me today unless it's about @Beyonce," Perry tweeted earlier today. "THANX."
Check out some other great internet reactions to Beyoncé's new album in the gallery above.
