Bingeing on Beyoncé: The Ripple Effect; Beyoncé’s new album and videos are innately sharable, generating a sort of ripple effect that is keeping the album front and center in the Web’s ephemeral consciousness

DECEMBER 20, 2013, 2:27 PM

Bingeing on Beyoncé: The Ripple Effect

By JENNA WORTHAM

Early in the morning of Dec. 13, Beyoncé turned the Internet upside down with the surprise release of a new music and video album, announced with a simple Instagram post. She did no traditional promotion for the album, no advance marketing.She didn’t need to. The Internet did it for her. Even before I’d heard most of the album, I’d seen highlights of the best parts from her videos, the cutest, funniest and sexiest moments from her opus, thanks to photos and GIFs circulating around the social Web.

As my colleague Ben Sisario wrote, fans flooded Twitter with more than 1.2 million messages about the album in the first 12 hours after its release.

But it wasn’t just Twitter. The day after the release, 25,392 original posts about Beyoncé appeared on the microblogging service Tumblr, roughly 26 times more the usual amount of posts that appear about her on an average day. Giphy, a sort of search engine for animated images known as GIFs, said they saw 600 GIFs pegged to Beyoncé, compared with an average of five before the album. And a recent hashtag search forInstagram photos and videos tagged “I woke up like this,” a reference to one of the catchier songs on the album, turns up close to 7,000 photos.

In other words, the album has created a social media class of its own, generating a sort of ripple effect that is keeping the album front and center in the Web’s ephemeral consciousness.

It has succeeded at this partly because the album and its video content is innately sharable online. The album and videos are easily broken down into bite-size chunks that can be passed around as effortlessly as the album itself. The packaging is tailor-made for the world we live in now, where content disappears almost as soon as it appears, and where it is necessary for new media to be reduced into little nuggets to ensure longevity and resonance.

I spoke with three of the directors who worked on the music videos for Beyoncé’s album. Each confessed that they rarely think in terms of how easy it is to share their videos when putting them together, but they all acknowledged the importance of keeping the conversation going and lengthening the life of the album.

Melina Matsoukas, who directed the beauty-pageant themed video for a song called “Pretty Hurts,” said she paid attention to which scenes in her videos and imagery resonated around the Web and got the most traction. “Each frame should be a photograph that you can frame on your wall,” she said, which would also make it an image worth displaying proudly on Instagram and on Tumblr.

In a video posted to Facebook, Beyoncé said she was pushing back against the trend in pop music of artists primarily releasing songs crafted with night clubs and car stereos in mind, or those carefully engineered to top singles charts.

“I remember seeing ‘Thriller’ on TV with my family,” she said. “It was an event.” Her self-titled album was meant to be a “visual album,” and give a window into her creative process, “that vision in my brain is what I wanted people to experience.” She added: “Now, people only listen to a few seconds of a song, on their iPods, they don’t really invest in a whole album. It’s all about the single and the hype.”

The change she is describing could fit the experience any content creator now faces when trying to stay relevant and capture the attention users on the fast-moving web. Now the event is largely in the bits, providing fuel to captivate the entire social Web, as they often do with major live event like the Oscars or Super Bowl. Other cultural happenings, like book releases or even television shows, have found it hard to reach this sort of event status.

But Beyoncé seems to have found a way for music.

A bar in Los Angeles even held a screening party for the videos in their entirety, and here in New York, I have friends who spent the better part of a day watching the videos in high-definition on big-screen televisions, something that is rarely done for music videos anymore. I’ve overheard people discussing it on the subway and caught strains of it coming out of stranger’s headphones. But even more people created or consumed the social media posts — helping keep the album a hot topic of conversation, both online and off.