Chappell Roan’s slow burner justifies an anniversary release
It has been a while since the mass defections to Bluesky from Twitter, now X, and while it has certainly not recovered from the loss and general bad publicity from my experience with the Avalanche account Bluesky has not fulfilled its promise either.
In the wake of Elon Musk acquiring Twitter it lost just under 9 per cent of its users and Bluesky increased by a similar amount. However this still left Twitter ten times more popular than Bluesky. The general feeling was that maybe the more engaged of users had jumped ship while the more casual user had remained, so even with its lower numbers Bluesky would become a useful platform to engage with people who might have an interest with what was on offer whether that be from a business or an artist.
I’ve rarely used any of the social media platforms to try and sell things at most posting that we have just managed to get in something I know a lot of people are looking for. It has been many years since we presold new releases by trying to persuade people to buy a release in advance as it just became a case of shops trying to come up with something that made the customer buy from them and not another shop.
There are two very big misconceptions about those who concentrate on preselling new releases. It has very little to do with “building a community” as sellers love to say and far more to do with simply trying to attract fans that already exist from buying from another seller. The second that follows on from this is that the fanbase is increased by these sellers.
In recent years there has become a fashion for anniversary albums and when an album has reached a relatively big milestone like 25 years or so there is a good argument for trying to promote that album again and attempting to reach a new audience. However gradually the timescale has shrunk until now we have reached the ridiculous position where we are getting one year anniversary reissues.
Very occasionally when an album has been a slow burner, as say happened with Chappell Roan, this can be justified but generally the albums this is done for are big albums that have sold well for the last year and the record companies are just trying to extend the life of the album. When this involves simply a different colour vinyl and a bit of extra packaging it is not the end of the world to all the fans who already own the album but once any extra music is included that is clearly unfair on all those who have bought the album already.
The same thing applies when an album is first released with those offering signed copies. That is certainly a nice bonus if the record costs no more than unsigned copies elsewhere but they can cost five and even ten pounds more. With several pieces of big news this summer we will just continue with X and Bluesky while also using Facebook and dabbling in Instagram and TikTok with the latter two now a bigger part of our social media presence thanks to others posting. I’m just glad we don’t use the platforms for selling and just news.