For this week’s Infinite Scroll column, Brady Brickner-Wood is filling in for Kyle Chayka.

In the summer of 2007, Kanye West and 50 Cent were embroiled in a high-wattage—and highly manufactured—promotional showdown. Both rappers had albums dropping on the same day in September and, to boost their respective first-week sales, were squaring off in as many venues as possible. They stood toe-to-toe, like boxers, onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards; they mean-mugged each other on the cover of Rolling Stone; they sat for a joint interview as part of a BET special titled “Kanye West vs. 50 Cent: The Clash of the Titans.” 50 Cent played the villain, belittling his opponent and threatening to retire if he didn’t sell more units, whereas West played the bashful little brother, a pink-polo-wearing whiz kid whose ambitions transcended the back-and-forth, but who still gladly participated in the pageantry. The rest, of course, is history. West’s “Graduation” was a sensation, selling nearly a million copies in its first week and débuting atop the Billboard charts. 50 Cent sold around seven hundred thousand copies and came in at No. 2, though the album effectively ended his run as a chart-topping solo artist. West’s victory marked a major shift in mainstream hip-hop—Glock-toting gangsta rap was out, euphoric genre-blending was in—but the face-off between West and 50 Cent may be most remembered as one of the last album-promotional events of its kind. (Combined, the albums became the highest selling No. 1 and 2 records in the SoundScan era.) The platform-driven internet, as we know it, was beginning to take shape, and with it a shifting media landscape that made marketing albums a much different, and more difficult, enterprise.

Last week, A$AP Rocky released “Don’t Be Dumb,” his first studio album in almost eight years, to instant streaming success, but limited cultural conversation. This wasn’t for lack of effort: Rocky has spent more than a year aggressively promoting the project, taking a traditionalist’s approach to its rollout. He sat with the Times for an interview and performed on “Saturday Night Live.” He recruited the filmmaker Tim Burton to design the cover art and tapped Winona Ryder to star in the music video for the album’s lead single. Oh, and have you heard he wrote a diss track about everyone’s favorite punching bag, Drake? Despite the theatrics, the album arrived as most albums these days tend to: an anticlimactic drop in an ocean overflowing with too much content. This is not to say that “Don’t Be Dumb” won’t perform well; it is projected to achieve a No. 1 chart position. But will the record capture the Zeitgeist? Will it survive the fast-moving content cycle or fade into memory? Will Rocky’s name be on the lips of your parents, your colleagues, the kids on the train? It’s possible—Rocky is an A-list star, with a high-profile marriage to Rihanna and a budding acting career. (Last year, he appeared alongside Denzel Washington, in “Highest 2 Lowest,” and Rose Byrne, in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.”) But I’d bet that “Don’t Be Dumb,” which lacks a true hit song or a narrative strong enough to satiate the attention economy’s endless appetite, goes the way of most contemporary blockbuster albums. Here for a cup of coffee, gone before dinner.

It’s not just Rocky struggling to drum up the requisite attention for a big-budget album. The Kid Laroi—a major-label darling who has seemed to be on the cusp of pop stardom for years—released a record earlier this month, “Before I Forget,” to tepid critical reception and only modest commercial success. Not even two weeks since it came out, the album seems destined to be discarded as an ineffectual data dump; some songs will put up big streaming numbers, most won’t, and, in a few months, when Laroi’s label inevitably re-releases the project as a deluxe edition, the record will receive another notoriety bump before once again disappearing from the discourse. Similar to “Don’t Be Dumb,” “Before I Forget” lacks a definitive hit and a compelling-enough story line, leaving little incentive to consume the album in full. (Unless, of course, one is extremely invested in Laroi’s recent breakup with the fellow pop star Tate McRae.) Even for a beloved rapper like J. Cole, who’s been teasing his forthcoming album, “The Fall-Off,” for several years and who just last week announced an official release date, it remains unclear whether he can create stakes high enough, and at a large enough scale, to elevate his record into the category of an event.

A key reason why it’s now more complicated to promote an album than, say, a theatrically released film, is the ephemeral, immaterial nature of contemporary music consumption. One no longer purchases an album—one purchases a subscription service that grants access to basically every album and song ever made. When a new album comes out, a representative single is featured on an editorial or algorithmicized playlist alongside a hundred other new songs. If a listener likes what she hears, she can further explore a record, then relegate personal favorites into her own customized playlist, turning the album into a menu instead of a meal. And the whiplash is unforgiving: a week later, a new slate of albums and singles are released and replace the previous week’s playlist entries. (This is why the surprise drop—a popular release strategy in the early-to-mid twenty-tens—no longer serves as an event-making moment for many musicians; in the streaming era, it’s too easy for any album to get lost in the chaos of Spotify’s “New Music Friday.”) Some artists can supersede this cycle, but they are the exception, not the rule. Taylor Swift’s albums have come to dominate the culture—and the charts—through a savvy, if not extreme, strategy. In the months after releasing an album, Swift announces dozens of vinyl, CD, and cassette variations, pairing merch drops with whatever new physical media she’s selling. Drake, on the other hand, has found success in this new media economy by embracing its built-in transience, flooding the market with a torrent of material, whether on Twitch streams or via short-form social-media clips. It’s notable, though, that both Swift and Drake established their core fan bases at a time when the album format still held audiences at attention—when purchasing a record meant actually paying for it and, thus, consuming the thing in full, again and again, whether you loved it or not.

By comparison, most films that see a theatrical release maintain a predictable, streamlined promotional schedule. There’s the film-festival circuit, the panels, the late-night TV bookings, the requisite Wired “Autocomplete Interview” and “Hot Ones” appearances, the red carpets and galas, the awards shows, the speeches, the articles and podcasts analyzing the awards shows and speeches. Viral moments emerge organically from these formats, generating online discourse and buzz that works to funnel more people to the theatre. The notorious press tour for the 2022 film “Don’t Worry Darling” largely orbited around alleged cast feuds and an incident at the Venice Film Festival in which Harry Styles appeared to spit on his co-star, Chris Pine. Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo accidentally created an internet frenzy while promoting “Wicked,” in 2024, by holding hands and weeping during interviews. Most recently, Timothée Chalamet embarked on an eccentric press tour for “Marty Supreme,” which included staging a mock meeting between him and the film’s marketing team; rapping on the British rapper EsDeeKid’s song “4 Raws”; and bringing a troupe of Ping-Pong-ball-headed minions with him to many of his promotional stops. Similar to his press tour for the Bob Dylan bio-pic “A Complete Unknown,” Chalamet has shrewdly fused old-media obligations with new-age virality hacking, making him ubiquitous across an array of audience demographics. “We have to be intentional, relentless, aggressive,” Chalamet said, albeit comedically, during his mock marketing meeting. “This has got to be, like, one of the most important things that happens on planet Earth this year.” The bravado had to have been a bit—right?—but it worked. “Marty Supreme” became a box-office hit and somehow launched Chalamet into an even loftier tier of superstardom. It helped that, all along, his promotional mission was clear: put asses in seats, preferably on Christmas Day, when the film came out, and dissuade people from waiting for the film to arrive on streaming. Otherwise, the argument went, they’d miss the moment. And what’s worse than not being present for one of the most important things to happen on planet Earth?

In a recent interview, Leonardo DiCaprio lamented the disintegration of the moviegoing experience. “First, documentaries disappeared from cinemas,” he said. “Now, dramas only get finite time and people wait to see it on streamers.” This wasn’t the first time DiCaprio described the existential threat facing movie theatres, but, in the wake of Netflix’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros., there was perhaps a new urgency to his grievance. He wondered if the cinema would go the way of the jazz bar: a novelty in modern society and a relic of a different time. He may as well have compared the experience to going to a record store and purchasing an album, one from your favorite artist, one you’d spent months anticipating. Peeling off the plastic wrap of a vinyl or a CD, pressing play for the first time—this was as great an event as any, and it is now largely unavailable to the modern music listener. The more that art exists only online, in the ether of the digital abyss, the less vital it starts to feel, and the more dispensable it becomes. Even worse, amid the endless barrage of newness, our tolerance for sitting with work that may surprise or challenge us, confound and move us, weakens—or vanishes entirely. ♦