Highlights
- Beyoncé surprised fans by releasing her album exclusively on iTunes before making physical copies available, leading to massive digital sales and record-breaking success.
- Target refused to sell Beyoncé's album due to concerns about digital sales affecting physical copy sales, resulting in her album becoming unavailable at Target stores.
- Beyoncé responded by handing out gift cards at Walmart, showing her dissatisfaction with Target and embracing other retailers to connect with her fans.
Beyoncé is one of the most influential music artists of all time, so whenever she releases new music or makes a statement about something, it's fair to say that it will create a lot of noise all over the world. Having started her career in Destiny's Child, Bey carved out a successful solo career for herself, she has been able to amass millions of fans from all over the world (fans that Beyoncé is very grateful for).
However, one company that didn't seem to get the memo was Target. When she released her self-titled album Beyoncé in 2013, Target took issue with how she released it, so refused to stock it in their stores. What they likely didn't think about was how Bey would respond to Target refusing to sell her album.
Beyoncé Dropped Her Album Exclusively On iTunes
As has long been the case now but at the time was a relatively new thing, many artists will release any new music digitally, whilst also having some physical copies available for fans to buy.
The album was a surprise release that fans weren't expecting, with Beyoncé being one of many artists who have released a surprise album, and she decided to try and drive initial sales of the album by releasing it on iTunes first for a few days before releasing physical copies.
Target Refused To Sell Beyoncé's Album In Their Stores
Target refused to sell Beyoncé's album for what was probably a valid business reason.
Prior to releasing Beyoncé exclusively to iTunes, Beyoncé had previously had agreements with Target when it came to a new album release. As an example, when she released 4 in 2011, there was a version sold in Target stores that had an exclusive six tracks available that fans wouldn't be able to get anywhere else.
So when Beyoncé decided to exclusively drop her next album on iTunes for the first few days of its release before releasing physical copies in-store, Target didn't take too kindly to this. In fact, they went so far as to completely ban any sales of Beyoncé's new album in Target stores.
RelatedBeyonce Was Lip Syncing During Her Biggest Performance Ever For Barack Obama's Inauguration, But Her Reasoning Makes Complete Sense
Beyoncé received lots of heat at the time for lip-syncing during the most important gig of her career at President Barack Obama's inauguration.Part of this reason was that, whilst a spokesperson for Target said that they are more than happy to sell physical copies of an album alongside digital versions, they said they weren't happy about the album being available digitally first as it affects the sales of the physical copies.
This was shown in the few days that it was only available on iTunes, Beyoncé sold 617,000 digital copies in the US and 828,773 copies worldwide. Beyoncé went on to become her fourth highest-selling album at 5 million copies; with the best being Dangerously In Love with 11 million copies.
Due to this amount of sales, the album ended up selling the most amount of copies in a single week on the US iTunes store and was also the fastest-selling album worldwide on iTunes (this was at the time and things may have changed since then).
Especially as it was made clear to retailers that physical copies of the album weren't going to have any exclusive content on them, Target clearly didn't see much point in selling the album as a large portion of albums had already been bought digitally, so the sale trajectory didn't look too good for them.
It was estimated by Billboard at the time that iTunes was leading the way in terms of album sales by all artists in the US, with it taking a 41% share. Meanwhile, Target only had a 5% share, so it makes sense why Beyoncé decided to prioritize iTunes over Target in this instance as it was likely to generate more sales.
Beyoncé Responded By Heading To Walmart To Hand Out Gift Cards
Clearly, Beyoncé didn't take too kindly to Target refusing to sell physical copies of her album, so she decided to go to one of their competitor stores, Walmart, and hand out gift cards to people who were shopping there.
RelatedAfter Sales Fell Dramatically From $93 Million To $40 Million, Beyonce Lost A Major Sponsorship Deal
Beyoncé lost a sponsorship deal with a major clothing line after her products didn’t sell as expected.Beyoncé ended up heading to Walmart to give customers $37,500 worth of gift cards ($50 each) to spend on whatever they wanted in-store. She even used the opportunity while she was there to pick up a doll for her daughter Blue Ivy and to pick up one of the copies of her album.
This was at their Massachusetts store, with Beyoncé later going on to perform at her concert in Boston. With her album being released a week before Christmas in 2013, not only was this the perfect Christmas present for her fans, but handing out Walmart gift cards to customers was the other ultimate gift.
Whether this was a direct hit at Target for refusing to sell her album (even though their store policy explicitly states why it wouldn't be doing that) or if she was just using the opportunity of being near a Walmart store to go and get a look at physical copies of her album whilst doing a bit of shopping whilst she was there is unknown.
However, Walmart was only stocking the non-explicit version of the album, which meant that any fans who picked up the album from one of these stores wouldn't have the exact version of each of the songs on the album.
Since Target refused to sell Beyoncé's album, there's no word on what version may have been available there.
RelatedBeyoncé Was Accused Of Stealing Choreography For Her Formation Tour From Another Show
The original show's choreographer called Beyoncé out for allegedly stealing the routine.But as the album caused Beyoncé to become the first woman in history to become number one on the Billboard charts with her first five studio albums, it's unlikely fans would have minded too much.
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