Blood Orange albums don’t usually follow traditional rollout conventions. We announced Negro Swan without any audio, track titles or guests. This allowed for multiple “moments” within the fairly short (five weeks) lead up to release and gave fans plenty to speculate about on socials and in forums.

Without audio, we were able to drive fans looking for streaming to pre-save options. This helped grow Blood Orange followers on Spotify and get the album (and singles) committed to Spotify or Apple Music libraries.

One week after announcement, two videos –‘Charcoal Baby’ and ‘Jewelry’ –were shared and those tracks were made available to fans. Blood Orange videos are often striking, powerful statements. We were able to really focus on both videos at once by running three-part carousel ads on Instagram and sequential six-second bumpers on YouTube. In this way, the advertising functioned more as an extension of the storytelling from the videos.

A few weeks later, the tracklist was shared via social and track names and guests were unveiled on DSPs. This was quickly followed by a performance of the track ‘Chewing Gum’ on Jimmy Kimmel. The track (and late-night performance) featured A$AP Rocky and Project Pat. Because the track hadn’t been shared yet with fans and the tracklist and guests only revealed a few days prior, it turned the TV performance into another moment for fan excitement and discussion on social.

The Monday before release, we announced a Spotify Fans First edition of the album in exclusive white vinyl, offered up to top Spotify listeners in select US and EU markets. The offer sold out before the end of the day.

The vinyl version of Negro Swan came out a few weeks after the digital. To celebrate the LP release, the artist held a pop-up merch shop in New York City. A video for ‘Chewing Gum’ also came out in tandem with the vinyl release.