When Beyoncé dropped her much-anticipated fifth offering in 2013, she reinvented how to release an album. Launched without warning, the success of it hung not on ad campaigns or chat show appearances, magazine profiles or radio rotation, but on simply being; an accompanying statement from the time describing the album as "an unprecedented strategic move" with music "stripped of gimmicks, teasers and marketing campaigns."

And it worked. Racking up 430,000 U.S. sales in the first day alone, Beyoncé set the template for the digital-age release. Drake followed, as did Kendrick Lamar, Rihanna, even Beyoncé again, each appearing with little to no warning and each marked less by the traditional press campaign surrounding the record and more by the complete lack of one.

When Bruce Springsteen released Born To Run in 1975, he famously appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek simultaneously, guaranteeing an audience that was, in turn, largely guaranteed to the magazines through their access to big name stars such as himself. Today, social media has changed that order. With huge and direct followings reducing the need for a middleman, it is now entirely possible for artists to produce and disseminate their own press and, at the occasional behest of the fans, at their own pace too.

An artist who understands this process better than most is Frank Ocean. Over the course of the last year or so, he has drip fed the basic goods surrounding his long-overdue second album - personal statements released on Tumblr, a sporadically updated website, a supposed live stream in which the most exciting thing to happen for a large bulk was someone clearing their throat - while a fervent network of fans have done the rest: absorbing, circulating and sending each piece of information viral, curating the "Frank Ocean" story in a way that was previously the preserve of publications.

The power has shifted. Ocean doesn't rely on television spots or magazine exclusives because, simply, he doesn't need them. With the internet acting as the primary means by which his fans receive their information, it is entirely possible to sidestep the publications he would previously have had to work with - both maintaining control over his output and avoiding the possibility of invasive questions (see also Beyoncé who, in 2015, was able to land the cover of Vogue without so much as an interview). The role of the press campaign is diminished. And that is a shame - if only because it'd be a hell of a thing to ask him about.

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Text Matthew Whitehouse