Years from now, people will remember where they were when Beyoncé dropped her surprise, self-titled album in December 2013. For two years, the pop artist was quiet on the album front, though she was still a major player in the industry (performing the Super Bowl halftime show, singing the National Anthem at the presidential inauguration, you get the drift).
But on Dec. 12, she surprised fans and uploaded a brand new album on iTunes, complete with 17 music videos. And it really, really worked.
The rapper (real name Scott Mescudi) has been on an experimental spree. After releasing two well-received albums, he spaced out, dropping material that ran far away from traditional hip-hop.
On Feb. 24, he surprised fans with Satellite Flight: The Journey to Mother Moon on iTunes, notifying audiences only two hours beforehand via Twitter.
Before Beyoncé and Kid Cudi, there were Death Grips. The experimental horrorcore hip-hop trio released a surprise album in November 2013, titled Government Plates. It came with videos and was free to download. How's that for one-upmanship?
Note: The lyrics in the video are NSFW.
The softcore rockers are one of the most popular acts in the world, so it doesn't take much publicity for them to be heard. Dropping their last album, Mylo Xyloto in 2011, the band surprisingly released a single on Feb. 25, titled "Midnight." The track came without warning, and also ushered in an announcement of a new album.
When it comes to rap, hardly any artist is more publicized than Kanye West. No matter what he's doing, he's constantly in the headlines, bragging about his talent like rap's Muhammad Ali.
That's why the radio silence around his sixth album Yeezus was so bizarrely out of character. The hype machine whirled so deafeningly, West only needed to make minimal moves, choosing to release the album without a cover, or a single, leaving radio stations scrambling to pick the best track.
There are two things Vampire Weekend don't care about: Oxford commas and album promotion. To announce their third album, Modern Vampires of the City, the band tweeted "NYT Classifieds," signaling fans to grab a copy of The New York Times and peruse the Classifieds section.
Sure enough, a tiny announcement revealed the name and release date of the upcoming album.
When you're an up-and-coming artist, you work like a madman to get your name out there -- but not if you're the Weeknd. The R&B singer (real name Abel Tesfaye), quietly dropped a few songs on YouTube, which quickly caught the ear of the music world and got a boost when rapper Drake tweeted about the song "Wicked Games."
The publicity grew, but Tesfaye stayed silent (most fans didn't even know what he looked like), dropping three full mixtapes and not doing a single interview. He finally succumbed to a 2013 cover story with Complex, in order to promote his proper first album, Kiss Land.
In the midst of the Yeezus hype, Mr. Carter made a special announcement: On July 4, he would be dropping an album, called Magna Carta Holy Grail (which was viewed as a slightly attention-grabbing move). He also announced a new business deal with Samsung, so anyone with a phone from the company could download the album for free. In another odd promo move, Jay performed the song "Picasso Baby" for six hours with performance artist Marina Abramović at New York City's Pace Gallery.
By 1999, Garth Brooks' country music popularity was waning, so he tried something different -- an entirely new persona. He created an alter ego named Chris Gaines, a hard rocker with a fictional past (which included a car crash that left him in need of vast amounts of plastic surgery). Brooks was supposed to star in a movie called The Lamb as Gaines, but when it was scrapped, he carried on, releasing an album later that year called Greatest Hits, also known as Garth Brooks...In the Life of Chris Gaines.
For more promotion, he hosted Saturday Night Live but performed as Gaines. Though a few eyebrows were raised towards Brooks' sanity, the album spawned a hit song called "Lost In You," which climbed to number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
The forefathers of alt-rock were not interested in regular promotion by the time they finished their seventh studio album, 2007’s In Rainbows. Thus, they decided to leak it themselves, making it available for download on their website. They also didn’t put a price on it, allowing fans to pay whatever they wanted for the album.
Electronic artist Four Tet (real name Kieran Hebden) isn't mainstream, but he has a massive underground following. When it came time to release his album Beautiful Rewind in 2013, he announced it just two weeks beforehand, with a cheeky tweet: "no pre order, no youtube trailers, no itunes stream, no spotify, no amazon deal, no charts, no bit coin deal, no last minute rick rubin." (The Rubin joke was a reference to last minute producing on Kanye West's Yeezus).
When it's time to release your 32nd studio album, how do you keep things fresh? Such was Prince's conundrum in 2007, for Planet Earth. His solution? Releasing a free physical copy of the album in an edition of The Mail on Sunday, a British newspaper.
Kid Cudi, the rapper best known for his hit song "Pursuit of Happiness," has pulled a Beyoncé. On Feb. 24, he released a surprise album, titled Satellite Flight: The Journey to Mother Moon, not too unlike a certain diva who released her self-titled work in December 2013.
When most musicians are prepping to release new material, they latch onto any publicity they can get. Music videos, elaborate announcements and tour dates are just a few of many ways artists try to get the word out.
See also: 13 Must-Follow Musicians on Instagram
But to be an artist is to be unconventional, and plenty of musicians choose to take more circuitous tracks for promotion. Beyoncé isn't the only artist to surprise release an album, and she won't be the last.
Here are 12 musicians who have taken unconventional routes to promote their artwork.
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