Black Star Release New Album Within Podcast Platform

A new album by hip-hop duo Black Star (yasiin bey and Talib Kweli) has been confirmed for a 3 May release; but it will not, certainly not at launch, be available to buy or even stream on leading platforms like Spotify or Apple Music. Instead it will be available only on podcasting platform Luminary.

This is a big deal for a number of reasons. The primary one is that No Fear Of Time is the first new Black Star album in almost a quarter of a century, following their 1998 debut, Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star. Fans have been waiting a long time for it. Secondly, Luminary is a subscription-based podcasting platform that costs $34.99 a year. This puts a cap on the total addressable audience.

The only music available so far is a 15-second teaser on YouTube encouraging people to take out a Luminary subscription to hear the music when it arrives next month.

Luminary is heavily pushing the album, with an episode of The Midnight Miracle podcast series (with Dave Chappelle, yasiin bey and Talib Kweli) discussing the origins of the album. The Bugs Bunny Mathematicx episode “serves as audio liner notes to introduce the album”, according to the podcast platform. The Mineral Mountain episode will feature a freestyle from yasiin, Kweli and Black Thought.

“With No Fear of Time, Black Star has crafted an important record and a different kind of record release, partnering with Luminary – a cultural label that is becoming home for the world’s most thoughtful artists,” says Rishi Malhotra, Luminary CEO. “yasiin and Kweli have a profound point of view and observation of the world we live in. We are proud to be a part of this definitive moment in music.”

Given how difficult it is to license non-library music for use in podcasts, this is a profoundly symbolic move, showing that albums do not have to be in podcasts, they can be the podcasts.

There has been significant experimentation over the years in how albums are released outside of the conventional routes of record shops, download stores and streaming services.

In 2019, Moby released his album Long Ambients 2 exclusively on the Calm meditation app. Soon after, Sigur Rós created a Liminal Sleep playlist with Calm and then electronic act Above & Beyond released their Flow State album through the app.

Like Luminary, Calm runs on a subscription model and this serves to reinforce the idea that none of these albums are being given away for free; rather they must be paid for.

An early pioneer here, using new digital formats to release music, was Björk back in 2011 who released her Biophilia album as an interactive app for the iPad.

Two years later, Lady Gaga did something similar for her ARTPOP album-slash-app.

Perhaps the oddest example of an act thinking beyond standard physical and digital formats for content was Max Tundra who, in 2008, released his Parallax Error Beheads You as a can of soup. (To be more precise, he sold 250 cans of soup on his record label’s site that came with a download code for the album.)

This year already has seen Kanye West release his Donda 2 album only as part of the interactive Stem Player device, making audio hardware a potential new audio format.

With over 60,000 new tracks being uploaded every day to Spotify in 2021 (unofficial industry estimates now put this at over 70,000 new tracks a day), standing out has never been harder to do.

Given the centrality of playlisting to the streaming experience, the emphasis is on tracks and therefore albums can struggle to cut through.

For anyone releasing an album today and for it to have an impact, both commercially and culturally, these are incredible odds they are battling against.

For all the examples listed above, the plan was to get as much advance attention as possible for the unusual way in which the album was being released.

We are now at a point where it is starting to look like the release strategy itself is the format.