It arrives on Friday and even if you are on summer vacation , surely you think that the weekend is finally coming, but if you are also subscribed to a music streaming service such as Spotify , iTunes or Deezer , it is possible as you see in the alerts Today they announce the musical news of the day, something that they do not do the rest of the week but why is it? simply because Friday is the day when records and new music songs are released, but why?
Why are the new music songs coming out on Fridays?
Since 2015, Friday has been established as the day on which musical novelties would arrive in stores . And when we say stores we are not referring only to physical stores (which unfortunately there are fewer and fewer) but also to music payment platforms and online song and record stores.
An agreement signed by record companies belonging to IFPI, which is the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, an organization that represents the interests of the record industry worldwide.
In this way and given that countries such as the Netherlands, Germany, Australia and Ireland had been launching their musical novelties on Fridays for some time, other countries focused on their strategy and thus since the year indicated (now six years ago) practically all over the world. world on Friday is associated with the release of the new music songs of the week.
Apparently the decision to do this was based on some good reasons for the record companies:
- Different geographic areas with different release days made hacking easier . For example, if a new single by a major artist was released in China on Monday and in Spain on Thursday, little was needed to pirate the single released on Monday in China and have it arrive in Spain before the official release on Thursday, with damage decent for sales. Setting a single day of the week around the world on which to post new recordings then prevents piracy.
- Streaming platforms change their schedules and playlists on Fridays . Friday is the day that new promotions and new playlists come out on Apple Music and Spotify, probably this had its influence so that in the end it was decided to launch the news on the same day.
- The third reason is that the Billboard rankings are made with sales from Friday to Thursday in mind . So, when publishing a news on Friday, the Billboard poll on Thursday gives several days to the sale before compiling the rankings. Billboard does not move sales as much, but for the US market it is still the magazine to read to monitor the rankings.
However, since then everyone releases their songs on the same day of the week, it can also happen that it is a problem for small independent artists , since they end up squeezed between big and bulky names in music. That is why the most indie music chooses to do something else: it releases its songs any other day except Friday , away from the clamor of the releases of the multinational record companies.
And on what day were the songs released before?
Now we all know why new music is released now before the weekend, but before? Was there a specific day for the release of news? Well, it depended a lot on the record company, the artist or the country, but it so happens that normally many companies used to release the records on Tuesday , claiming that that was the day when people were more “encouraged” to buy a record or a new CD. The weekend and especially Monday, had passed and people were already wanting to do things, like buying music after leaving work or class. Also, a Tuesday release was almost an early week release and still allowed for the sales level of each artist to be counted at the end of the week.
