There are a handful of artists who are so big that any new album campaign is not so much pushing on an open door as immediately obliterating all doors and walls. Adele, Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, J Balvin, Drake, Beyoncé, Harry Styles, BTS, Black Pink, and Ed Sheeran.
Sheeran’s latest album, – (Subtract), is released on 5th May and continues the mathematical motif in how his albums are titled. For his previous album, = (Equals) in 2021, he was the first major artist to really embrace YouTube Shorts as a major marketing partner.
All 14 tracks on the album were teased two hours ahead of the full album release with a series of YouTube Shorts videos, under the banner of “The shorter side of =”. He offered a brief insight into the meaning behind every track in the videos and also allowed fans to create their own videos (with the inevitable #SheeranShorts hashtag) for each of the tracks.
What was most interesting about it all was the exclusivity window – just two hours before it went on DSPs, and only brief clips of each track (a bit like the 30-second previews on iTunes when it was the dominant digital platform). No artist today can risk upsetting any streaming platform by being seen to give rivals “preferential” treatment.
Given that YouTube Shorts had only launched in July 2021 and Sheeran’s = album came in October 2021, this was less about YouTube pushing Ed Sheeran and more about Ed Sheeran pushing YouTube Shorts.
This move by Sheeran and Atlantic was, in many ways, a testing of just how far they could push things, backing a new YouTube initiative (and getting the full weight of the YouTube machine behind the campaign) without risking a diplomatic incident with Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon and more.
To his credit, Sheeran has stuck with the platform and posts semi-regularly on it. He is currently using it to tease tracks from his upcoming album (and also to drive pre-orders and merchandise sales).
The Subtract Sunday sessions sees Sheeran performing brief acoustic snippets of tracks from the album every (you guessed it) Sunday. It is an echo of the = campaign, but the viewing numbers for someone with over 52m subscribers on YouTube are not exactly barnstorming. Some posts have had around 60k or 70k views, with the most-watched clip amassing just 170k views.
Maybe it is something he does to guarantee wider support across YouTube, but an artist this big does not have to spend time on creating content with (for them) low engagement; but – and this is the part that is often overlooked in an age so obsessed with metrics – maybe he just enjoys it.
