If you saw Nardwuar’s interview with Tyler The Creator, something may have jumped out at you. He mentioned how much he hated music getting released on a Friday.
He said: “We should put music out again on Tuesdays instead of Fridays”
“I know people think because of the weekend they can listen and stuff, and streams go up… I think it’s a lot of passive listening at parties, or… people get the time to go to the gym, so they’re not really listening.”
Regarding a release earlier in the week, he added: “You really have that hour or thirty minutes to really ‘dive in’ and really listen because you know once that’s over you’ve got to get to work.”
In the UK, Monday mornings was when you bought your records. The whole ritual of letting sales build-up for a week and seeing where they’d land on the Sunday chart, the bunking off school to buy new LPs… it was great. Obviously, streaming means people won’t skip school (which is objectively a bad thing – good albums should make you want to bunk off), but the weekly cycle from Monday to Sunday was a good fit.
However, in 2015, it was decided by god knows who, that globally, all new releases would come out on a Friday. For our money, that leaves new music languishing in people’s two days of leisure or the only time they get to scrub the shower clean, or whatever. Walking around with a new album in your ears to ease through the working week makes much more sense to us.
You can still have your listening parties on a Friday, if anyone sincerely does that (although, have you ever been invited to one? First we’ve heard of it).
Tyler added: “To work on an album for so long, and put so much energy into it, for it to be released at midnight just seems so disrespectful,” because albums are landing when most people are asleep.
Honestly, we don’t know why there’s a fixed date. The charts are only of interest to big acts, and even then, in hip hop, you can sling out a potentially superior mixtape on whatever day you like.
It seems this was initially a thing to combat piracy.
“Tuesdays were always the release day for the United States, but other countries released music on Mondays, and others on Fridays,” explained Shanna Jade to Complex. “This meant that someone in a country with a Monday release day could purchase something the day it was available to them and upload it to a piracy site. Fans in other countries could pirate that upload for free while they were waiting for their country’s release day, no longer requiring them to purchase it when it came out officially in their region.”
Five years on from this, we’ve no idea whether people are pirating things any less, and if you have a VPN or enough hustle, you’re getting your hands on music when you want it, regardless. Suffice to say, pirating is still a thing so the music industry clearly hasn’t won the war.
Here’s the Nardwuar interview with Tyler.
In the same interview, Tyler called for more music journalism and less “gossiping”-style interviews from artists. “We need to stop fucking going sneaker shopping or fucking deep-throating hot wings for an hour,” he said. “Talk about your album. Talk about music. Talk about the 15 songs that you guys have spent time to get mixed and mastered and put your heart into and produced and did all these things.
“And then when the album comes out and it sells two copies, everyone’s confused. But it’s like, they don’t want to talk about the music or the album; they’d rather fucking go eat chicken wings and sneaker shopping.”
The Pop Corporation 
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