Seven years ago, a line of rain-soaked fans clogged the blocks surrounding, arguably, New York’s worst music venue. Frank Ocean was playing his first show in support of the just-released Channel Orange at Terminal 5 that night, and the five boroughs were caught in a torrential, wind-whipping derecho. It deterred no one; not a single person abandoned the line, in hopes of getting through the doors to hear the Gospel of Frank. This fall, we find ourselves in the midst of another deluge. In recent weeks, Ocean—the man whose only means of contact with his fans for years was a Tumblr page that you’d periodically refresh in the hopes (almost always in vain) of finding a new stray thought or link to some old car commercial—has transformed into a full-fledged content machine. After years of near starvation, fans of the singer suddenly find themselves flush with radio shows to listen to, (controversial) club nights to attend, new singles to stream, exclusive 7” vinyls to order, expensive t-shirts to wear, posters to hang, and printed square silk scarves to drape over their faces. The tide, it appears, has finally come crashing in.

View more

It started last fall. In November 2018, Ocean unlocked his previously private Instagram account. “Finsta no more!” he seemed to proclaim, greeting the world shirtless in his inaugural public post and sending a fervent pocket of the Internet into a frenzy. Just a few months later, he appeared on the cover of this very magazine, participating in a rare (at the time, at least) on the record interview. The spring brought another interview, the summer yet another, and the late summer, for good measure, one more. What could have stirred the recluse from his somnolence. Did something bigger loom on the horizon?

In October: invitations to the aforementioned recurring after-hours club night, PrEP+ arrived (or not, if you’re most people). On the first night, at Knockdown Center in Queens, Ocean brought out special guest DJs Justice and Sango to tease two, still-unreleased songs. Then came two surprise episodes of his Beats 1 radio show, Blonded, on which he premiered “DHL” and “In My Room,” his first original releases in over two years. At another party, he teased yet another new song with British rapper Skepta. And there was also, of course, so much merch.

Considered en masse, these recent goings-on do have the trappings of an album rollout. And while this eventually might prove true, there is something else at work here. Something more tacit. Something a little more programmatic. Ocean is beginning to engage in a practice that many of us who work in arts and media are all too familiar with and one that he, for many years, seemed to refuse to actively participate in: He’s brand building.

More specifically, Ocean is transforming Blonded—his Instagram handle and the independent imprint under which he releases his music—into a multi-platform brand experience that you can engage with in different ways and at various price points. That $80 scarf too expensive? What about the $60 t-shirt? Can’t make it to PrEP+ on a school night? Have you considered ordering the $15 “Cayendo” 7”? Wanna hear the radio show? That’s free with your Apple Music subscription, pal!

Branding, and brand monetization, has been a lot of our minds lately. The digital landscape is saturated, content is increasingly disposable, and as a result, margins are shrinking. Many of our biggest stars have had to resort to bundling their albums with energy drinks and clothing drops in order to top the charts; others package records with ticket sales, driving their first weeks through the roof before plummeting off the charts the next. For artists, these are dire times.

Frank Ocean is likely very rich. Of that I have very little doubt. This fact makes it all the more worth noting that he’s decided to get in on the game. It speaks to a shrewd understanding of what sustainable success for a commercial artist in 2019 looks like. He need only look as far as his good friend Tyler, The Creator.

Creator is perhaps the ur-example of this new model. From the very beginning, the now 28-year-old mini mogul was concerned with creating a comprehensive, branded world. In the roughly eight years that Tyler has been a public commodity, the multi-hyphenate artist has diffused his teenage rap and skate crew Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All into a popular sketch comedy show (Cartoon Network’s Loiter Squad), a number of apparel lines (Golf Wang and Golf le Fleur), an annual music festival that has sold out Dodger Stadium two years running (Camp Flog Gnaw), and even a scented candle.

Making money in this ecosystem doesn’t necessarily mean bundling downloads of your album with promotional dietary supplements. It does mean engaging with your fans on multiple fronts and entering what is likely already a pretty enthusiastic and creative dialogue they’re having amongst themselves anyway. Ocean’s modus operandi has traditionally been one of a maintain the mystery variety. But now, it seems the 32-year-old artist has taken a break from reclining on his high concept furniture to engage with his eager listeners.

Engagement almost always comes with a price. Within hours of its announcement, Ocean’s party kicked up a storm online. Many took umbrage with his naming of the event after the HIV prevention pill PrEP and his stated mission for the club night of imagining “what could have been of the 1980s NYC club scene if the drug” had existed. Some saw it as a shallow, potentially disrespectful gesture to those affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It represented one of the first perceived missteps for an artist whose public regard has almost always been unusually high. It even prompted the stuff of celebrity nightmare: the dreaded “iPhone Press Release” (his, of course, coming in the form of a Tumblr post). But this, as we know, is the risk of wading into “brand-dom.” Where you could previously glide along on the safe raft of being withholding and abstruse, having ventured out into open water, you now have to carefully navigate the treacherous current of public opinion, ready to plug any PR-related leaks along the way.

Whether Ocean and his Blonded brand can maintain their unblemished sheen under these new conditions is the real test of the coming months. As we know, greater exposure hasn’t always benefited the perception of past stars, much less their work. Ocean seems uniquely equipped for such a moment, though. He’s an independent artist with full creative and financial control of his output and he commands an audience whose size and intensity is rivaled by few others. Just this past weekend, Drake—one of the few artists whose influence on the last decade of music might outsize the Blonde singer’s—appeared at Camp Flog Gnaw as the weekend’s surprise headliner and was summarily booed off stage. He was guilty, apparently, of the blameless crime of not being Frank Ocean.