Music Industry Considering Global Weekly Release Date

At last, it looks like Australian piracy – however indirectly – might actually have a positive impact on the recording industry, after reports emerged this week that the global corporate music community is considering adopting a unified weekly street date for new releases, likely to begin a year from now.

The new arrangement would see new releases made available on a Friday – Australia’s current weekday street date, which, given our geographic and temporal position, means that piracy begins before records see the light of day in the UK (which drop on the following Monday) or USA (Tuesday), as Billboard reports.

The change was allegedly mostly spurred by an increasing need to rein in illegal downloading, although that is not the sole reason, with Billboard suggesting that a recent trend among artists using guerrilla marketing tactics – Beyonce and Nicki Minaj being two of the most recent notable examples – and paying little heed to traditional schedules and release formats has also contributed to the consideration of a global street date.

The deal is far from a certainty – some reports suggest the IFPI, RIAA and major labels are all on-board, though that has been disputed by other sources – but, given the impetus on curbing piracy, and the general powerlessness of independent labels and physical stores to effectively stonewall the change should they be opposed to it, it certainly possesses a great deal of weight in terms of likelihood of being pursued.

"This global street date is necessary for the industry but unfortunately it will be awkward for the physical retailers to change their ways of doing business," an unnamed label executive told Billboard. "Now, they could have two-thirds of their sales in one day."

Restructuring the ways with which business and marketing opportunities are engaged is not the only challenge that faces stakeholders likely to be affected by such a change – the shift would have ripple effects that reach everywhere from physical distribution chains to how weekly music charts work and potentially even the release schedules of other entertainment products from the US home video and book industries, which adopted their music-industry street date of Tuesday after the standard was set.