Before that, whenever a record arrived at a store, employees just put it on the shelf. What that meant was that some artists had a clear advantage over others, depending on when their album arrived. Creating a standard day evened the playing field. Tuesday is also a date that is firmly rooted in a culture that printed, recorded, shipped, unboxed, and bought albums in their physical form.
When albums weren't digital downloads, they required a lot of manpower. By placing the release date on Tuesday, record labels had the entire weekend to ship new inventory across the country to record stores, and stores had a full non-weekend day Monday to unpack albums and prepare the store for shelving. For artists, the benefit of releasing an album on the standard American Tuesday release date is that it makes your album sales look better.
Billboard creates the top album and singles charts every week, and those are published on Wednesday and track sales from Tuesday to Tuesday.
But for a smaller or up-and-coming artist, making a top 10 or even top sales list can really change your career. That wasn't always the case. The Billboard Top chart has been around since the s and used to be tracked on the standard American week Sunday to Sunday.
It was only after the standard Tuesday was introduced that Billboard switched when it counted. So really, that benefit could easily have happened on any day of the week. Mostly, though, Tuesday is just what the record industry did. In fact, Billboard reported that the American Association of Independent Music which fights for independent American labels and Department of Record Stores which represents independent record stores both wanted the global release date to shift to the American standard of Tuesday during recent negotiations.
It was the day we Americans crowned for new music, for better or for worse. In short, piracy. When albums came out on different days in different countries pre-internet, it didn't matter. Someone in Germany might read a review in an international newspaper about a US release and simply wait four days to buy the album in their own country.
But now, the world is smaller, connected by the internet, and more impatient. Follow Broken Secrets. Secrets by Email Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Join 5, other followers. Contact Info Contact Us.
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Top Charts. Hot Songs. Billboard Top Videos. Top Articles. By Keith Caulfield. In that intervening year, however, we've seen more than one move that would seem to cut down on sales potential, whether streaming platforms handing out exclusivity deals or artists holding their albums back from streaming altogether.
A year later, has it helped? Up until last year, international releases were scattered throughout the week: an album would be released in the United Kingdom on Monday, Japan on Wednesday, and Germany and Australia on Friday.
The Tuesday release in the US, which shifted from Monday in , was largely the result of logistics: crates of records, cassettes and CDs could ship over the weekend, arrive on Monday, and be on the shelf the next morning, rather than trickling into stores over the course of a Monday. As digital formats became the default way people purchased—or stole—music, staggered release dates turned from inconvenience to threat.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a London-based trade association, understood that it needed to optimize the way labels released online content. They hoped that choosing a single day of release worldwide would help curb the piracy issue. So last July, the IFPI unified the day of release for all 1, of its member labels based in 60 countries—since then, almost all new releases have come out on Friday worldwide.
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