Before Drake’s Ice Block Challenge: 10 Wild Album Release Stunts, From U2 to Beyonce to Kanye West

By Andy Greene

Andy Greene

Late last month, an enormous block of ice — roughly 25 feet high with each block weighing 300 pounds — appeared in a Toronto parking lot. “Danger Do Not Touch,” read a nearby sign. “This ice structure may break or collapse without warning, and falling ice or sharp fragments may cause serious injury or death. Do not touch or interact with the structure. Any contact with the structure is at your own risk.”

Most people would have likely obeyed the sign had Drake not shared the address and GPS coordinates with his 139 million Instagram followers along with three words: “Release date inside.” That was all it took for fans to swarm the site and start chipping away at the ice block with any tools they could find, including baseball bats, ignoring the warning that the effort might actually kill them.

The stunt generated headlines all across the world, created quite a few headaches for the city of Toronto, and ultimately revealed that his new LP Iceman is coming out May 15. It was a refreshingly analog way to promote a new album in the age of TikTok and Instagram, and it’s part of a long history of album release stunts that usually get their intended message across, and sometimes backfire in devastating fashion. Here are 10 of the most memorable ones.

• Radiohead, ‘In Rainbows’

  

  Record stores were hanging on by the tips of their fingernails in 2007 when Radiohead came along and essentially pushed them into oblivion. Their form of destruction came in a post by Jonny Greenwood to Radiohead’s website on September 30. “Hello everyone,” he wrote. “Well, the new album is finished, and it’s coming out in 10 days; we’ve called it In Rainbows. Love from us all.”

  It included a link to a website where fans learned they could pay anything they wanted for an MP3 version of the album, including absolutely nothing. They could also pony up and buy a physical album along with a bonus disc of eight additional tracks. No matter what they did, it didn’t involve a trip to the Virgin Megastore or Tower Records. The gambit was a huge success that provided a framework for many other acts to follow, even if some were critical of Radiohead for offering fans a compressed version of the LP as a download as opposed to a high-res file.