When the music industry proposed making Friday the official Global Release Day for albums back in 2015, not everybody was onboard. Independent labels worried an international standard release would monopolize attention; American record stores wanted to stick to Tuesday, the street date they’d built their operations around; some fans begrudged any change to their routine. Despite the bellyaching, the transition seemed to go smoothly. In the decade since, it’s remarkable how quickly New Music Friday has become a ritual for both the industry, which reoriented its calendar, and for fans, many of whom eagerly stay up on Thursday nights to hear new albums first.
But Friday’s dominance over the release calendar may be slipping. Fans couldn’t hear Bad Bunny’s latest, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, on a Thursday at midnight, because the album actually came out on a Sunday, January 5. Benito is just the latest artist to buck industry practice over the past year, after Kendrick Lamar, Ye, and Tyler, the Creator all passed up the usual drop date for new albums. Their gambles paid off commercially but also show why skipping the global Friday release is a risk not every artist should want to take.
Once releases shifted to Friday, the Billboard charts shifted their tracking periods as well. That remains artists’ and labels’ biggest incentive to release music then: You put yourself in the best position for a good chart debut. Take the first-week numbers for Bad Bunny’s Sunday release. DTMF debuted at No. 2, behind Lil Baby’s WHAM (released on Friday, January 3), breaking Bad Bunny’s streak of three No. 1 albums. While the set earned 122,000 album units in its five days — just marginally behind Lil Baby’s 140,000 — Bad Bunny’s previous album, 2023’s Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana, debuted with 184,000 units from a full tracking week. Day over day, DTMF had slimmer returns, but with a Friday release, it still would’ve likely topped WHAM. (This is also mostly a concern for artists jockeying at the top of the charts — indie artists like Ethel Cain, who dropped her new project, Perverts, on a Wednesday, have less benefits in sticking to Friday.)
That’s not to say artists can’t still successfully bypass the current global release day. Three of 2024’s No. 1 debuts released late in the tracking week: Lamar’s GNX at noon on a Friday, Ye and Ty Dolla $ign’s Vultures 1 on a Saturday, and Tyler’s Chromakopia on a Monday. It likely helped that all of those records came into their release dates with considerable buzz. Ye and Ty were embarking on a long-teased project, with fans once again eager to see if Ye’s talent remained amid public controversy. Lamar’s surprise album was a drop-everything coda to his beef with Drake, full of lyrical Easter eggs to keep fans talking. But Chromakopia has the most replicable model. Tyler had been dropping cinematic visual teasers for weeks and, as part of those promotions, made his Monday-morning release date extremely clear to fans. The album ended up being his best chart showing ever, earning nearly 60 million more first-week streams than his 2021 effort, Call Me If You Get Lost, in nearly half the time.
Tyler understood that attention was the game. In fact, it was his motivation for releasing the album on a Monday in the first place. “People on the weekend, they want to chill and hang out, so they’re not really listening,” he told Nardwuar in 2023, arguing for a return to Tuesdays. “But I think if you put it out during the week — man, that commute to work or that commute to school, just whatever that is, you really have that hour or 30 minutes to really dive and really listen.” (He also added that it’s “disrespectful” to release albums at midnight.) And since Friday is still the custom, Tyler had fans’ undivided attention once Monday rolled around. He kept it over a three-week run at No. 1, also the best of his career.
Bad Bunny didn’t nearly match that level of pre-release promo. He released two singles in December, “El Clúb” and “Pitorro de Coco,” and neither splashed on the charts. And while he announced the album ten days out with a video clip, Benito never touted an intriguing visual world like Tyler did. But that’s never been Bad Bunny’s strategy. His No. 1 debuts are impressive for a Spanish-language artist, but more impressive was his 13-week streak at No. 1 with Un Verano Sin Ti in 2022. After bowing at No. 2, DTMF already looks to have similar legs, with one song going viral on TikTok and another topping the YouTube charts. That gives Benito another shot at a No. 1 album next week — assuming Taylor Swift’s Lover live release doesn’t block him — and the chance for his first-ever “Hot 100” chart-topper, too.
Bad Bunny still hasn’t explained why he released DTMF on a Sunday. The album, influenced by traditional Puerto Rican styles, is a departure from his recent trap-oriented work. Maybe he wanted to release it with fewer expectations, or give fans time to warm to the music. In multiple interviews since the release, he’s said he wasn’t gunning to earn a No. 1 or make history. “I don’t ever try to break some record I already broke or to do better than who knows what,” he told Rolling Stone. But if DTMF hits No. 1 anyway next week, it would be the biggest non-Friday success yet. The fans may deserve the most credit, though, for seeking out his music regardless of what day it came out.