I fully understand the rationale and marketing concept - entrenched in the streaming era where physical sales are relatively worthless in the grand revenue model - yet I highly dislike the impromptu "here's an album" releases.
These surprises are usually reserved for huge, global artists with massive social media fan bases that will instantly jump into a new single or record, but something just doesn't feel as grandiose as counting down to an official release date.
Music revenue is definitely not dependent on physical media sales anymore and I now know some albums don't even get CD or vinyl releases in brick and mortar stores 'til months after they hit Spotify/Apple/Amazon/YouTube/Bandcamp to keep overhead low, etc. But mostly gone are the anticipation-building 6-8 week lead cycles full of music video debuts, cover art leaks, press preview loops and print ads in the Source. That was half the fun of building a new artist or new project.
Imagine if 'Illmatic' just magically appeared in 1994 after Nas' acclaimed guest spot on "Live at the Barbeque" by Main Source.
Also, the former standard of Tuesday releases gave us fans much more time to take in a record. Clearly competition for ears is a lot more fierce nowadays with so many more artists having the ability to spread their music directly to the public, but I've seen plenty of midnight on Friday drops by the big names relegated to old news by Monday in today's news climate.
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