Oh, you like podcasts?
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Heres Sam, from the episode:
December 13, 2013.
Dear listener, do you remember where you were?
All 14 songs at once and even more music videos.
1 in more than 100 countries almost immediately.
She did it all without a single leak, a feat she couldnt accomplishthisweek with her newest album.
So she says, Well, we can stop the leaks if we just dont do physical CDs.
Because once something exists as a file
Its out there.
Its done.Yeah, its absolutely out there.
She said, Im not doing it that way.
Im doing it this way.
It was a star of her stature basically saying, This is where my fans are.
This is where the conversation is.
This is where the real and new marketing is happening now.
This was back when Beyonce had only 8 million followers.
She has about 270 million now.
Everybody else was pretty traditional.
Very few artists or labels had gotten that something was going to have to change.
But back then, that still wasnt the case.
People were still talking about breaking songs on the radio.
I remember people going to Ryan Seacrests morning radio show like, Ryan, heres my new song.
Will you play it now?
As we know now, it is the main dish.
Beyonce knew that and took advantage of it early on.
Beyonce knows how to make a meal, okay?A whole meal.
And she kicked it up, too, because she was like, Im so sure of myself.
This is the thing that makes her so seductive and sexy as an artist.
Shes like, Im so sure of myself.
No, Im not going to do that.
All my songs are amazing.
Im not going to parse it out for you.
Im going to smother and suffocate yall with my stuff.
You just loved it for the audacity as much as you loved it for the art.
I think some people though, some artists, some label executives still didnt want to believe.
And not just at labels.
There used to be these things called magazines.
I used to run them, at least two.
We were a third party.
We were between the artist and the fans.
And Beyonce said, I dont want any of that.
One of the big things they drive home is that Beyonce was relying on no one else for anything.
But Beyonce took away a lot of the power that a label would usually have.Yes.
There used to be so much more control from the labels.
That literally just doesnt happen anymore, and Beyonces a huge part of that.
In some ways, some of what she was doing was already happening.
Smaller artists were saying, Oh, theres MySpace, theres SoundCloud, theres all these different things.
I can just press a button and put my music out and release my music to my fans.
Whether I have 16 fans, 1,600 fans, or 16,000 fans, I have control.
No one is going to have spoken about any of it.
No one knows its coming.
Im about to shut this whole world down at Christmas time.
Your optimism, and the fact that you really think that anyone has adapted.
I wish I could say that they had.
I think there is so much nostalgia for how things used to be.
Now people long for the days when terrestrial radio was the biggest player in the game.
And so its hard to let go, to imagine,Oh my God, it really has changed.
Lets really start thinking about things differently.
Lets stop acting like the intern is the social-media consultant.
No, it really doesnt.
When she announced the album, she didthis big spread withBritish Vogue.
She was in charge.
They were happy to get her time, and they wrote that article as such.
They were working for her.
The powers flipped.Its completely flipped.
So theres also a feeling of,Didnt you tell me that I couldnt be on the cover?
We should consider Beyonce not just as a musical artist, but also as a business executive.
I think she is not even at the middle of where shes going to be.
This interview excerpt has been edited and condensed.
