Whether just a music fan or working in the industry, you won’t be able to ignore Fridays seeming to serve as the core day for new music drops.
You’ll have noticed the #NewMusicFriday hashtags that pepper Instagram and social media, or if you’re a journalist, the litany of PR emails vying for your attention on their hot new act’s big release at the end of the working week. Whatever your place in the weird world of music, every upcoming album or EP unleash seems to orbit the old Anglo-Saxon “day of Frig.”
Are you just imagining things? Obviously, there’s a slew of staunchly independent acts on Bandcamp that will drop an album without care for a label or concern for the day of the week, but for artists rising to even a minor profile in the unwieldy musicland, albums are overwhelmingly slated for a dependable Friday slot.
There’s even an industry name for it. Sometimes dubbed New Music Fridays, Global Release Day is the universally accepted moniker slapped across Fridays as a key weekly scheduler of the vast gamut of new albums waiting to be let loose on digital platforms or brick-and-mortar stores.
It makes sense. No different from the date behind a blockbuster’s widespread theatre showing or a video game’s download countdown, Fridays are most people’s paydays, and it’s likely the consumer has the weekend of leisure to indulge in their new purchase.
So, have new albums always been released on a Friday?
Truth is, GRD is only a fairly recent industry standard. Spurred by the surprise drop of Beyoncé’s eponymous album on a Friday in 2013, GRD was established two years later to tackle the rise of music piracy by ensuring a uniform date around the world for any album’s instant, official access rather than regional delays exploited by illegal downloaders.
Before 2015, new albums had no real guideline as to when they hit stores, and differed by country. In North America, it was actually customary to make the latest records available on a Tuesday, giving the Billboard charts the time to collate their sales info the following day and give the music stores a chance to stock the LP in question ahead of the weekend. In the UK and France, however, albums were often dropped on Mondays.
Yet, such disparate operations around the world ceased with Beyoncé. Opting for Friday as the day fans could get to know the album across the weekend and out to the world at the same time, it didn’t take long for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry to create the unified GRD for the majority of major releases then on, eager to sweep aside the pirates and cultivate a moment of cultural focus in the atomised streaming age.
The GRD looks set to stay in place with near certainty, as many as 45 signatory countries issuing new music on Friday, 00.01 local time. Unless anyone’s got any better ideas, it’s hard to think of a better day of the week than Friday to finally get our hands on the eagerly awaited new tunes ready to score the weekend.
