For the better part of 10 years, I spent my Monday nights preparing and Tuesday mornings selling music new releases for a big box retailer. My time there coincided with a sharp decline in record sales (2001-2010), but I will take no blame for the recent state of the industry.
As I spent time preparing carts full of compact discs by the likes of Coldplay, Madonna, and Norah Jones — so much Norah Jones — I often wondered if our company’s music buyers were insane for the quantities we sometimes received of certain new releases. But I also wondered, why Tuesday?
Until 1989, new release day for music was Monday. But according to Billboard, four major record labels (Capitol, EMI, Manhattan, and Angel) were concerned about some stores not receiving new albums until late in the day Monday, so they moved their release dates to Tuesday to help those stores out. Soon after Polygram and MCA also followed suit, and Tuesday became the new music release date in the United States.
There were other benefits to having release day on Tuesday, including giving your album a full week of sales before the newest Billboard charts were released on Wednesday, but the biggest one might have been shipping. By having your album released on a Tuesday, you gave stores an opportunity to track sales, and place restock orders, so they would have inventory available for the weekend when stores are full of customers.
While music release day in the United States was Tuesday, this wasn’t the universal release day across the globe. Release day in France and the United Kingdom continued to be on Monday, while Australia and Germany scheduled their releases for Friday. With the rise of the internet, digital downloads and piracy, this meant that Kanye West’s new album could be online and ready to download before stores even opened in the States.
Over 25 years after they moved their release date to help stores with shipping issues, the major labels gathered again, and in February of this year decided that the new global music release day will be Friday starting on July 10. So if you went into your local music shop, or logged onto iTunes to download the latest Veruca Salt — they’re back! — album on Tuesday, you had to wait a few more days this week.
The major labels believe that this global release day will help lessen the effects of piracy on the industry, which in turn they hope will make early unannounced releases (for example, Beyonce in 2013) less likely. Another reason for the move is that focus groups told the labels they were more likely to purchase new music on Fridays and Saturdays. Essentially, it all breaks down to sales and for a flailing industry, they could use all the sales they can get.
Not everyone is completely happy with this decision. Independent labels and record shops in the UK and US have voiced concerns about the logistical costs involved with moving from Monday or Tuesday to Friday — costs the major labels can afford, but smaller businesses may find troubling.
There’s also concern about the reason new music releases moved to Tuesday way back in 1989: the shipping of inventory. But with a new sales model leaning heavily on digital downloads, most labels won’t be too concerned if your local shop is out of a physical copy of your favorite band’s new album when you are looking for it on Sunday afternoon.
Of course, in a world where everything is readily available with a few clicks of your mouse, it makes you wonder if it actually matters which day is new music release day. Consolidating the world’s major music market release dates may seem like a good idea to dampen the effects of piracy, but it’s not going to end music piracy, or early releases.
It’s also not going to increase sales. There’s no miraculous cure-all for the steady decline of album sales over the past 15 years, from almost $15 billion in 1999 to $6 billion in 2013. A universal release day may slow the decline, but getting even a quarter of those sales back is probably a pipe dream.
With an increasing number of ways for us to listen to music outside of physical albums, both legally and illegally, it makes a music release day seem somewhat antiquated and unnecessary to the general public. It also feels like the actions of an industry struggling to regain footing in a new world it still doesn’t understand.
Will “new music Fridays” still be the norm in 25 years? Most likely, the major labels will continue to hold their artists to specific dates for release. But independent labels and well-established artists may find that releasing their music when it is finished instead of at the whims of out-of-touch CEOs is more lucrative. And that’s kind of an exciting thought for an industry that sorely needs one.
