Whole Lotta Red: Genius Album Promotion

In the current day, Hip Hop fans have to endure seemingly endless dry spells of music waiting for their favorite artist to release their usually highly anticipated and teased albums. Long wait times for music can be caused by any number of reasons, including but not limited to licensing issues, problems with music labels, sample clearances, leaks, etc. Artists may also feel they are not ready to release new music and want to prioritize quality in their work over quantity. Many times in this industry however, it is out of their control to determine when they can release new music. Rollouts, promotions, and marketing strategies are essential to the success of albums. If Artists aren’t able to successfully captivate fan attention and create hype for projects, their album and music sales will be impacted significantly. Although this tactic often leaves fans longing for new music, it almost always increases the overall ‘hype’ surrounding the given project and its’ success once it is released.

One of the most famous examples of this is Playboi Carti’s highly anticipated second studio album, Whole Lotta Red. Following the successful release of his first studio album, Die Lit, a video surfaced of Playboi Carti stating that his next album would be called “Whole Lotta Red” and named Virgil Abloh as the creative director of the work. The following year, one of Carti’s songs titled “Pissy Pamper” featuring Young Nudy leaked, and went viral on TikTok. The song also managed to reach number one on Spotify’s US Top 50 list before being removed by Carti’s music label. Throughout the entire 2018-2020 timeline, Carti had only officially released a feature on Drake’s “Pain 1993” track, as well as the single “@ meh.” Leaving fans wondering where his new album was, Carti gave no insight as he hardly posted or interacted with his fans on social media.

On November 23, 2020, however, Playboi Carti appeared on Instagram Live and teased music seemingly part of his anticipated project, finally ending his disappearance from the internet. Over the course of the next month, Carti’s presence on social media continued to increase, finally giving fans the hope that the album was dropping soon. Finally, on December 10, 2020, Playboi Carti fans were at last given certainty the album was being released in the near future. DJ Akademiks, a popular Hip-Hop news streamer, announced on stream that “[He] damn near had to sell [his] soul for this information [...] and that [Whole Lotta Red] was gonna be dropping Christmas day.” Akademiks stated that this was “The reason [Carti] posted that he got a gift for y’all [...] He’s Santa. [Whole Lotta Red] is the gift. And to be honest, from what I’m hearing, expect a classic.” Two weeks later, Whole Lotta Red dropped on Christmas day at 12:00AM, and garnered over 100,000 sales during the first week of its release, and landed at No. 1 on Billboard's top 200 chart.

Although the rollout for Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red was highly unorthodox, it was wildly successful. At the end of the two year wait, Carti was the center of the internet for a short period of time and undeniably had marketed himself in the smartest way possible. A combination of the multiple leaks, blips of social media presence, as well as the unusually long time between the release of new music, all came together to create arguably one of the most highly anticipated Hip-Hop albums of the 21st century.

By: Jack Tomlinson