Unless you’ve been living under a rock or frozen in carbonite for the past week, the entire music industry .has been Beyoncinized. (We’ll see just how many Beyonce puns I can come up throughout this article. So far, 2 for 2) Beyonce decided to release a surprise album several days ago with absolutely no promotion, no singles, and no videos. Heck, I thought she was busy taking care of little Blue Ivy while Papa-Z was out on his Magna Carta tour. Not the case. You’ve all probably heard how it’s breaking all these records, there were music videos for each song on the album, and how it’s been the craziest music release in the past decade. So I won’t bore you with all the details and instead tell you why everyone else in the music industry needs to take notes.

Going into this rant, I want you all to know I’m not the biggest Beyonce fan, but I respect her music and DAT ASS. (Sorry Jay Z) The biggest problem with music releases today is over promotion and albums push backs. I’ll see an announcement for a CD months before it comes out and the artist promoting it will hype it up as if they caught Mewtwo with a Great Ball. Cue the 3-5 album push back dates.

BORING! I’m tired of waiting months and months for an album that everyone behind it is saying it’ll be mind blowing only to find out that it’s actually just a mediocre project. The hype train killed your album! With Beyonce’s strategy, there was no hype train and there were no push backs. The surprise of actually having this full album right away played a huge factor in her fan’s enjoyment of the album. Less promotion and less pushbacks equals a better chance to release something that no one expected.

Since we live in a time where “leaks” happen so much, we’ve become less of a surprised demographic.This is why so many artists think they need to hype up an album because they think that there’s no other way to surprise us. Take it from Beyonce. We can still get surprised.