The newest trend in the music industry features artists rebranding recently released LPs into “deluxe” editions, typically adding extra songs to the original tracklist. These songs may be throwaway tracks that did not make the original cut, or entirely new songs recorded after the original release of the album. In the past, artists often used this as an opportunity to boost physical album sales on tours and part of merchandise bundles online as a sort of bonus special product. But this past year, we have seen an explosion of deluxe albums hit streaming platforms, especially from rappers, who often drop these extra editions just a week after the initial release.
There is a common misconception in the hip-hop world that this is nothing new, and when discussions of rappers beginning a new trend come up, people quickly shoot these opinions down with examples of deluxe albums from many years ago. However, it is the Machavellian music industry, a lack of touring, loopholes in the RIAA certification criteria, and an overall desperate climate that has led to an influx of deluxe albums that differ significantly from their predecessors. First of all, COVID-19 has grinded all live music plans to a screeching halt. Smaller artists often live and die off touring revenue. Without this income, artists have been forced to put out more music than they usually would. Deluxe albums in 2020 have usually been quite long, often extending an entire extra album’s worth of content to its original, rather than the traditional three to five song additions. According to the RIAA, a deluxe album sale is credited to the original album rather than its own specific sales numbers. To place high on the Billboard album charts and receive greater recognition, artists (or their clever music labels) have learned to sell significant, jam-packed deluxe albums one week later, so the album sales will benefit from the first week sales of the original on top of the first week sales of the deluxe to generate much larger numbers overall. This also makes it seem as if their album did much better than it actually did, or would have done without the deluxe. They may even include basic animated lyric videos, quickly shot music videos, and “alternate versions” of songs in an attempt to boost the number of plays and thus units sold. More controversially, deluxe albums have been included as a part of merchandise packages, a method that Travis Scott used to propel Astroworld to #1 on the album charts among heavy competition. This regulation has since been modified, and although deluxe album sales regulations may also be altered, expect your favorite artist to double their released content in the near future. Similar to many other industries in the country, there is a “new normal” in the recording world.
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