Idolator

Pushing back release dates is akin to a movie not being aired for reviewers! You know it must suck!

I agree on all counts, so I'm just going to ask a shocked/appalled tangential question:

That Amy Heckerling movie is going direct to DVD?!

Oh, god, I feel awful for her, as a fan of Fast Times and Clueless with high hopes for that flick. What a shame. (To be fair, it could actually...erm, suck.)

@rainmkr: Not quite- it's more "you know it'll tank." Amerie's album made the Idolator critics' list. Doesn't mean she didn't have to sell her soul to the devil for a UK top 40 hit- in a country where all one usually needs for a top 10 hit is a pulse and limited higher brain function.

Maura, i'll challenge the headline. I don't want to get into too many specifics but there are many sound reasons to delay the release of an album for a "reasonable" period of time - the examples cited in your article of course, are unreasonable amounts of time, although the reasons for the delay may well be sound. for examples...

Touring - Very difficult to promote a record without a tour. Touring is also expensive. And getting on a good tour/shows takes time and work, and of course luck. When an artist is working several international territories, this becomes more complicated and schedules must be adjusted accordingly. Furthermore, it's easy to see the kind of impact an artist's mere physical presence in the territory has to do with promotions in that territory - its pretty essential. for example, usually, the more an artist is in the US, the more you hear about them.

Release Schedule - Distributors, manufacturers, labels, marketers all have release schedules. Why? 1) To not oversaturate the market with new releases (tough!) and 2) To ensure that all the staff and resources required to make an album/artist a success are actually available and not committed elsewhere. There's a lot of new releases hitting the market every week - I posit more than ever before - and believe it or not everyone in the "industry" is in it to make money (gotta pay bills yo). So when there's concern over the money-making potential of a release compared to the costs involved with releasing it, it's easy to see how certain releases get delayed. Furthermore, re-scheduling a release is always more complicated than it seems. For example, we have the good old media to thank for their long lead-times for press advances

Quality - Oh man i can count 5 marquee level artists i've worked with in the last few years who deliberately delayed their album releases (sometimes for a few years) - when everything was set up good to go- in order to go back into the studio and re-re-re-re-work their masterpiece to perfection... Interestingly enough, this is the "problem" we face most often at World's Fair - slaves to the perfectionism of the genius mind. We like to think that's a problem we like to have :)

They pushed back Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On about a year and a half due to Berry Gordy dragging his feet. They also pushed David Ruffin's David back 30 odd years.

They've always delayed albums and movies but given more hype and the internet, we hear about it more especially in the case of Nicole Scherzinger.

@jasonelias: Good point. Album delays have always been common, and they don't always mean anything (as opposed to, say, movie delays, since major motion pictures are generally made on a tight schedule and if production shuts down or gets shelved for any amount of time, it's usually a bad omen). I think there are 2 big differences now: 1) that the media (especially blogs like, well, Idolator) report on such delays a lot more now, whereas before those stories would've been little unremarkable bumps in the road as fans waited patiently for new albums, and 2) labels push back releases with much shorter notice nowadays. It used to be that once a video was on TV and the album artwork was finished, that thing was shipping out to the stores and given a chance to succeed or fail in the marketplace based on public opinion. Now, labels get 2 or 3 weeks away from the street date, and if the BDS on the single isn't where they want it to be, they'll pull it from the pressing plant like a governor calling in a pardon at midnight. Release dates don't mean what they used because of that, as much as leaks.

Also, I'm calling semi-bullshit on Sanneh's article -- until just now, I hadn't even heard of All $tar or knew anyone by that name was signed to Cash Money, but he's got "one of the year's most eagerly anticipated Southern hip-hop albums"? There are literally dozens of rappers signed to major labels whose release date sob stories are far more surprising, some of whom having released platinum albums in the past but now shelved and given no chance to follow up on whatever success they once had.

The import factor alone is, I think, reasoning for not pushing back an album's release in one market while having released it in another. Kylie Minogue's X was a record that was much anticipated by those core buyers her American record label can count on to purchase her LPs, and because of the time span between its UK release and any attempt at an American release, most people who would want the damned thing have already bought it in the past two and a half months, the same as for Amerie. With downloads being what they are, I'd think a universal, international release date for any album would make a ton of sense, but you know, that'd require the record companies to start making a ton of sense.

Usually delaying a release date for a movie signals that it's pretty bad. There are exceptions; Idiocracy was buried by Fox for completely different reasons, and sometimes a studio will delay the release of one of their tentpole films so they don't open the same day as another studio's blockbuster.

But even if the movies are good, if the public finds out about a delay, they'll automatically assume that the movie is poor. Why else delay a completed film? The biggest problem about the delays, as GovernmentNames mentioned, is that the public is more in tune with what goes on inside the industry. The proliferation of media is a double edged sword for studios and labels. It means a lot of free publicity during development, but as soon as things start to go wrong, everybody will know about it.

This sort of thing has been SOP here in Nashville for many years -- here, at least, it costs a hell of a lot more to market an album than to make it. There are umpteen million unreleased albums sitting around in the vaults on Music Row. Two of my favorite albums of the last couple of years -- the debuts by Sarah Buxton and Ashley Monroe -- have never been released.

I'm 99% sure all the delays have guaranteed Chinese Democracy an extra 100,000,000 albums sold... Lesson: If you're gonna delay an album, delay it at least a decade.

@GovernmentNames: For me most of that article was full of BS, but it was a way to get All $tar's name in the press. But as quickly changeable as rap is, an album from 2005 is going to sound old. That's the way it's always been but there's less room for error now. @El-Zilcho: I do like having more info about albums, delays, etc. It is bad for the labels and studios but it's much more interesting.