Less than 24 hours after the Raconteurs announced the one-week gap between announcement and in-store date for the group’s second album, another hotly awaited follow-up, Gnarls Barkley’s The Odd Couple, has been bumped up to… any day now. Excerpted release from the duo’s publicists after the jump.
Gnarls Barkley, the Grammy-winning, genre-wrecking partnership of artist/producer Danger Mouse and soul sensation Cee-Lo, will release their new album The Odd Couple a couple of weeks early.
Initially slated for an April 8th release, The Odd Couple will now be available at various online and physical music retailers across the week of March 18th.
“They felt the timing was right to just go for it,” said an unnamed spokesman for the band. “With the shifting seasons, furtive romantic entanglements and fierce college basketball rivalries, the latter half of March can be confusing. People need to be soothed and inspired now.”
This is pretty funny, though we still think the Raconteurs model beats it out. If Gnarls Barkley really wanted to act quickly they’d have released it the day it leaked. After all, it’s already been two weeks since we first heard The Odd Couple.
I think it isn’t the leaks themselves that dictate release schedule changes, but rather the reactions to leaks. If it’s well received and generates a lot of blogobuzz, they keep things unchanged and let hype/word-of-mouth grow for a while, so they can later milk it. It’s all about those first-week sales.
If the reaction however is somewhat lukewarm, putting it on the shelves (virtual and otherwise) quickly is better. A bizarre flawed strategy to be sure, but I’ve seen it time and again and it’s par with the level of marketing genius we’ve come to expect from record companies.
This is in Rhapsody as of this morning.
too bad this album blows, also (leak *cough* leak)
ollie, you think these companies know what they’re doing to that extent? dude, duuude, cmon
Man. These guys are zany.
I heard this playing at a local Newbury Comics, where it was on sale. I didn’t hate it. Or buy it.