During Cole's rollout I got to thinking about the impact of his debut album, an album that pretty much nobody really thinks too much about in his discog. Even though it did not deliver on the hype musically or become the classic he wanted it to be and hyped it up to be, it was super influential on the industry because:

it didn't have a hit single (Work Out fell off the hot 100 before it dropped and didn't reenter or peak until 2012) and still sold a ton of units, showing labels that blog-era internet rappers could sell units off internet hype without radio help

what other albums are influential for NON-MUSICAL reasons? could be aesthetics, rollout, song titles, idk

TLOP

nobody really copied its sound

but that era still felt really influential

I vaguely remember asap rocky saying in that one interview how Frank’s Blonde/Endless scheme changed how labels did things

Great example. Basically a tutorial for how to use the streaming era

Yeah they stopped doing all those exclusives after Frank finessed them, another good example

yeah that was it

beyonce s/t and surprise drops altho i feel like it's not done so much these days

I lowkey think the Cole album and others like it were important in the progression towards surprise albums, because they showed a popular artist with an internet fanbase could sell units without a single

but yeah of course Beyonce is the number 1 example for that

Yeah more like he copied the sounds of whatever dipshit everyone was feeling
#culture vulture ye

Nav dropped the Brown Boy EP as a deluxe to this album, essentially starting the "whole new album as deluxe" trend

dan i wnTed to say uzi did it first but nah this is a whole year before EA

Super slimey being immediately followed by a bunch of other high profile collab albums

in rainbows normalizing pay what you want methods allowing sites like bandcamp to flourish

The posthumous careers of Pac and Big especially in terms of getting rappers to feature on songs with dead people, reworking demos from the ground up, and squeezing every last dollar out of their body of work with lax quality control.

House of Balloons

In what way

The dark d***ged out if it ain’t snowing I ain’t going aesthetic for ugly r&b niggas

Whoever invented the surprise album drop

10 year anniversary next month

yeah its def musically influential and aesthetically too, feel like people bit the entire swag and not just the aesthetic but you're probably right

in hindsight it set a really bad precedent

Def the entire swag

it is a double edged sword for sure

Changes and Justice