How do you consume an album? These days, it's likely through a digital platform like Bandcamp or Spotify, but you may also have a fondness for the ol' vinyl. Yet what makes you consume music? Was this an artist you heard on a playlist and fell in love with? Was it seeing an artist at a festival? Was it someone you heard on the radio? This may seem like a simple question, but some machinations have come and gone as means of trying to get you to purchase a record or concert ticket that is far beyond your control. The music industry, for decades, has changed and evolved and found strange little gimmicks to drum up interest or force an artist down your ears that you may not even realize. In some cases, these gimmicks are fun and actually work, but let's not forget about some stunning failures along the way as we discuss the music industry's biggest gimmicks used to try and get you to listen to or purchase music via traditional (see: legal) avenues.

While it's easy to write down Napster as the death of the physical release, the truth is that innovations still take time. While the music industry will never be back to its 2000 level of selling nearly a billion CD units, the harshest drop came between 2005-2008, wherein the industry went from moving 700 million discs to half that. During this period, several innovations were being tested to "sweeten" the purchase for a customer, and DualDiscs were one such attempt. The concept was simple: instead of having music on one side of a compact disc and album art on the other, one side had music while the other had a DVD containing documentaries, music videos, and any other type of fan-baiting digital content. The higher manufacturing cost only accounts for a two-dollar upcharge for most consumers, but the larger issue was selection and user experience. Only a scant amount of releases in this format (including Fiona Apple's "Extraordinary Machine" and Foo Fighters' "In Your Honor") and most standard CD players (and especially car players) had a hard time recognizing the format or simply wouldn't play. While the format was introduced in early 2004, it died out quickly, with only a few DualDisc titles arriving in 2006 and none thereafter.

Even in our current age of endless streaming services, radio still plays a huge part in the music industry, as getting a single song in a Top 40 or key market rotation could ensure play for months on end, if not longer. While most major radio stations may not have the freedom to play whatever they want, mainstream DJs used to wield great power, and as Chris Molanphy's great Slate "Hit Parade" podcast pointed out, a stubborn disc jockey's insistence that a B-side or album cut was the "real" hit sometimes paid off huge dividends. Yet, in 2005, a New York Attorney General's findings showed that SonyBMG were more than happy to bribe radio programmers to get their artists in rotation. Specific examples included getting a station executive and a guest flown to New York City in exchange for listing Jennifer Lopez's "I'm Real", and, in perhaps the most infamous example, one label executive sent the most damning email possible to a station programmer: "What do I have to do to get Audioslave on WKSS this week?!!? Whatever you can dream up I can make it happen." The pull record labels had back then is almost unbelievable, with slush funds being established and sometimes labels going as far as to cover some radio station's operational expenses in order to have certain favors done in return. Major radio stations were never institutions that had to fear the erosion of public trust, but these investigations only showed how deep record label greed was when at the height of their powers.

Sponsorship in rap music is nothing new. When Run-DMC dropped their legendary single "My Adidas", some rumors spread that the band was paid to do it, but no, they just really loved that shoe brand. (Adidas later gave them a hefty sum for a sponsorship deal.) In 2005, an article in Advertising Age revealed that Mcdonald's had an ongoing deal where if a rapper could integrate the phrase "Big Mac" into their lyrics, the company would pay the MC anywhere from $1 to $5 for every time said verse got played on the radio. In the 2000s, a brand could get "free" advertising by having a song in heavy rotation, which is partly why there was a notable uptick in mentions of companies like Cadillac, Hennessy, and Gucci in commercial rap music. While sometimes these were mentions were done without corporate input and just made for great rhymes, other times, a brand would explicitly pay for the name-drop. While details about pricing specifics remain very hush-hush, a shout-out must be given to Petey Pablo, who ended his 2003 star-making hit "Freek-A-Leek" with the legendary line "Now I got to give a shout out to Seagram's gin / 'cos I drink it, and they payin' me for it". Poetry.

In a list full of tactics that the music industry has used to try and get your hard-earned dollars, it's nice to occasionally stumble across something with genuinely-good intent. Record Store Day was created in 2007 as a way to gin up traffic to local record stores just as CD sales were collapsing. The idea was that rare, hard-to-find, and unique albums would be released for that day and that day only to the indie shops with loyal fanbases and a true love for all things music. While it's super cool to pick up an out-of-print soundtrack or one-off EP by a beloved artist, the unqualified success of the event has led to some drawbacks, including hot releases getting scooped up only to be turned around for immediate sticker-shock resale online. Additionally, as the years have rolled by, RSD is now hosting a glut of inferior products, as it's hard to imagine why the soundtrack to the television show "The Blacklist" required a vinyl release, much less one exclusively tied out to Record Store Day. While the intentions are noble and have already generated much goodwill, Record Store Day will need to continue to evolve if it hopes to reap benefits for independent music retailers. (If you haven't checked out what a "Bandcamp Friday" is, it's well worth your time and money.)

Were CD singles really a "gimmick?" Weren't they just ways for artists to release cool B-sides that became coveted collector items? Wasn't this just a way for casual listeners to get the song they loved the most without buying a full album? Well, that's how it should've worked, but the music industry (in case you haven't figured out their modus operandi already) got greedy. You have to remember that for the longest time, the Billboard Hot 100 was tabulated solely from single sales (there was a separate chart for airplay). But record labels soon realized that if a song was blowing up, they'd pull CD-singles from the market, preventing music fans from purchasing a roughly three-dollar CD single slipcase and instead of spending $16 or more on the full-length album it was from. For this reason, No Doubt's world-conquering smash "Don't Speak" charted in every other corner of the world but never charted on the U.S. Hot 100 (but did top the Airplay chart). There was simply no CD single for it, forcing fans to buy the parent album "Tragic Kingdom". This fate also befell The Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris" (an obvious chart-topper that only peaked at #1 after Billboard integrated CD sales and Airplay simultaneously), and MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This" (which topped out at #8 only because his label pulled the CD single from shelves partway through its chart run, hoping to goose album sales). In short, CD singles should've been a regular part of the music consumption life cycle, but when record labels cared more about money than the consumer's actual needs, they treated it like a gimmick.

Most people view cassette tapes as a product of the '80s, but the origin of mass-produced pre-recorded cassette units can be traced back to as early as 1966. The format didn't take off in the music industry because, for the longest time, there simply wasn't a readily accessible price point for the average consumer to enjoy the format. That all changed in 1979 when Sony introduced the Walkman into the world, giving consumers access to a portable radio along with playing whatever cassette they wanted while on the go. Some music industry types were worried that with people having the ability to record onto blank cassettes, they could tape songs off the radio and never listen to or purchase an album ever again! This didn't end up being the case, but mixtape culture, where people painstakingly mixed and matched songs into custom orders for friends and lovers, became a cultural currency all its own. Following their decline in popularity in the '90s and the advent of streaming services in the 2010s, digital playlists soon became the new mixtapes. You could assemble a custom order of songs from an incalculable breadth of recorded music. Custom playlists are fun but don't have the same impact as a mixtape, and now upcoming music artists jockey heavily to be featured on corporate-run playlists in hopes of exposure. No wonder cassettes have slowly been making an unironic comeback in recent years: there was no reason for the perfect medium to die out so abruptly.

Following the boy-band/teen pop explosion of the late '90s and early 2000s, it's clear that the music industry could milk the CD-buying youth for every disposable dollar they had. Yes, they bought the Britney and *NSYNC compact discs in record numbers, but what if they could hear those same songs in mono, one-minute increments? Introducing HitClips, a strange way of marketing pop singles in which a small portable player could have a "clip" inserted into it and you could hear 60 seconds of beloved classics like Aaron Carter's "Aaron's Party" or soulDecision's "Ooh It's Kinda Crazy". The format did sell (it ultimately moved somewhere in the 30 million unit region over four years), but after 2004, interest in the product waned, largely because they couldn't move enough units of Lindsay Lohan's single "Ultimate" (we're guessing). This type of alt-consumption format has seen various iterations, with 2007 introducing "Tooth Tunes", wherein a pop song would play on a specialty electric toothbrush for the recommended duration of time it takes to get your mouth bones clean. Additionally, while not based on the same technology, the MiniDisc format was sold to above-driving-age music consumers as a potential alternative to the CD format, but it never took off in the same way.

There are so many artists trying to break through these days: you're lucky if you have a hit song and even luckier if you have a beloved album. Yet in an era where sometimes fans simply want you to play the hits and nothing but, some bands in the 2000s started adopting the "album anniversary tour" format, playing a legendary record end-to-end and maybe, if you're lucky, giving you a smattering of other hits in the encore. This format has become especially popular when it comes to festival placements, as sure you can hear whatever new inscrutable nonsense The Flaming Lips are putting out these days or you could put your music-loving dollars towards watching them play legendary record "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" from start to finish. Linkin Park, KoRn, Bloc Party, Weezer, They Might Be Giants, and more have all done such stunts. While this format isn't new, it has picked up more notoriety and prominence in recent years. Few, however, will ever be able to outdo bizarro-pop titans Sparks, who in 2008 performed 21 different shows wherein one of their classic oddball long-players was played front-to-back every night in front of a live audience. Literal months of rehearsals were required to pull off the stunt, but the group received serious accolades for doing it, as few acts could ever pull off such an insane feat.

Even with diminishing returns following the landmark success of "Thriller", a Michael Jackson album would always outsell just about anything else on the market. For his 1991 effort "Dangerous", he went mega-platinum per usual, selling over eight million copies in the U.S. alone. Yet fans noticed on the back of the CD that this album was advertised as being "mixed in QSound," unaware of what that meant. In fact, very few people knew what it signified, as this was designed to give a full 3D aural experience, despite most people listening to music out of two speakers. The format was used in several video games and even some films, but surprisingly few albums proudly brandished the markings of being mixed in "QSound", as Sting's "The Soul Cages" and Sophie B. Hawkins' "Whaler" were never the most lionized sonic documents. While certain earhole connoisseurs may claim to distinguish distinct new changes in the mix, most consumers never thought much of it and could barely hear a difference, meaning QSound came and went while leaving the music-buying public with more Q's than A's.

The compact disc era of music was synonymous with the rise of the personal computer, as anyone could simply pop a CD into their tower and play their favorite hits, or perhaps even rip songs or make a mix-CD themselves. Record labels saw the benefits of maximizing the home computing experience for a music lover, so they unleashed a bevy of albums and CD-singles with "enhancedCD" technology. While the compact disc still played like an album, any remaining disc space not taken up by music could be turned into an in-computer experience where fans could pull up lyrics, watch music videos, look at photos, or have any number of multimedia experiences. Viewed as a promotional tool, enhancedCDs began rolling out in 1994 and lasted for a few years, with records by Randy Newman, Alice in Chains, and Mariah Carey all getting this new digital experience. At times, it was clunky: New Age artist Kitaro enhanced his "An Enchanted Evening" album with a view of his official coffee mug ... which you could then order via phone number for $10. Some users found that CD rippers didn't recognize the extra data on the disc, which soon led to unfortunate and often corrupted file pulls. With the rise of the internet and MP3s, the need for such additional content soon cratered, and the technology did not survive long after the 2000s.

The infamous compilation series "Now That's What I Call Music!" started in the U.K. In 1983 and has not ceased. In fact, in April of 2022, the series unleashed its 111th volume. In the U.S., the series that simply rounds up all the big new hits and puts them all in one place started in 1998, and as of this, writing has unleashed its 82nd volume. Prior to the digital era, there was a good bit of sense to having all of your current radio hits all collected on one convenient disc, but now that you can assemble your own "Now!" compilation with a few simple clicks, the series feels vestigial almost to the point of archaic. There are many variants and off-shoots depending on what country you're in (an indie rock variant in the U.S. titled "This is Next! Volume 1" was attempted but promptly laughed at), but so long as pop stars keep making hits, they are going to keep making "Now!" CDs.

Most records go through constant change and revisions throughout the course of creation, but 2016's "The Life of Pablo" pulled a strange trick in which Kanye West proceeded to tinker with his published work after release, as only in the streaming era could an artist add a song like closing track "Saint Pablo" four months after the album's release and have that track be considered a part of the official tracklist. While prolific artists like god-tier pop icon Carly Rae Jepsen can release a whole disc's worth of B-sides a year after she drops an album, an increasingly popular strategy in the streaming era has been the rush-released "Deluxe" versions of any given album.

Often, a deluxe reissue of a record would arrive after a significant anniversary, but in the age of streaming, it's all about goosing numbers. No longer constrained by the 78-minute length of a compact disc, album track lengths can easily eclipse over 20 songs, all of which count towards streaming totals. Additionally, some albums receive digital "deluxe" reissues a week after release, including anywhere from one to five brand-new songs that weren't on the original edition, hoping to keep listeners alerted to new products and atop any hot New Releases playlists. This is all to help push albums to #1 positions or make sure they maintain their chart runs, and in some cases, this practice can become especially egregious. In 2021, Doja Cat released her massively successful "Planet Her" on June 25th and, a mere two days later, released a deluxe edition with four additional tracks and one extended cut. Even with all of that push, it still only managed a #2 debut in the U.S. but lingered in the top ten for months due to its many radio hits. It's still not great for fans who purchased the digital standard-only edition only to, 48 hours later, find out it wasn't the complete package.

Before the great Blu-Ray/HDDVD wars of the mid-2000s, many hardcore audiophiles expressed discontent with the compressed sound of most major CD releases. They cried out for a new audio format and received it in the form of Super Audio CDs. Ushered in during 1999, SACDs served as a high-end alternative to regular CDs, offering over four gigabytes of room for audio versus a standard compact disc's measly 700 megabytes. The extra space allowed for things like surround sound or multi-channel availability, but accessing these amenities required the sometimes cost-prohibitive purchase of an SACD player. While the "dual" layer SACD was developed, wherein both standard-CD audio and SACD audio could be formatted to the same side, it still felt like a product designed for the most discriminating consumer, which is why several self-serious acts like Pink Floyd, The Who, and Roxy Music were all in favor of having their records remastered to accommodate the new format. While initially introduced in 1999, the format all but effectively died off by 2007, despite finding a surprisingly strong audience among classical music listeners. It was a noble attempt at catering to the high-end consumer, but the marketplace response to this product was far from "super."

There have been plenty of album release stunts before but in the wake of Radiohead's decision for fans to "pay what they want" for their 2007 masterpiece "In Rainbows", few tricks ever captured the cultural zeitgeist quite like they did. So major names went the giveaway route: Jay-Z's 2013 divisive effort "Magna Carta Holy Grail" had a million copies pre-purchased by Samsung, which the company, in turn, gave away to users of their products (which they did again with Rihanna's "Anti" the following year). Prince gave away his album "20Ten" in the U.K. to anyone who had a subscription to certain magazine or newspaper publications. Yet most infamous of all was the biggest giveaway gimmick in history: when Apple put the previously-unannounced U2 album "Songs of Innocence" on everyone's iTunes account at the same time in 2014. As is always the case with U2, legacy press publications like Rolling Stone couldn't stop gushing about it, but the indifferent response to the record from everyone doused the stunt with bad vibes. Others complained that the action was intrusive, as many people didn't want a U2 album to show up in their account, leading many to criticize the corporate-mandated nature of the event, robbing listeners of agency. The band has acknowledged the awkwardness of the delivery but refrained from apologizing outright. No wonder a free mega-release of that size hasn't been attempted since.

Record labels (and some artists) are obsessed with the charts more than the average music consumer, and securing a chart-topping album is a big deal. Even after Billboard changed their tabulation to include streaming numbers to be mixed in with digital and physical sales for total album "units" in 2014, physical/digital sales continued to crater, and when A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie's 2018 release "Hoodie SZN" hit #1, it did so by selling only 823 copies: a minuscule sum given it still "moved" 58,000 total units during that timeframe due to "streaming units." So the industry figured out a strange get-around to get traditional record sales back to the forefront: through bundling. Buying a ticket to see an artist's upcoming show? Great! By doing so, you get a free copy of whatever their newest album is, which can be in the form of a CD or, more often, a digital download. Did everyone redeem their "free" album? Of course not! But it still helped move units, which is why Kenny Chesney scored a particularly strange chart-topper with his 2017 concert album "Live in No Shoes Nation". It's rare for live albums to sit in the Billboard penthouse, but due to the nature of not every purchased "album" being listened to by the intended recipient, eyebrows were raised, and eventually, the practice was deemed ineligible for Billboard chart tabulation in 2020. Funny enough, as soon as Billboard stopped accepting the practice, album/ticket "bundling" also fell out of popular favor. We'd joke about how Chesney can't afford shoes anymore, but it sounds like he's doing just fine without them.

Album leaks are nothing new: so long as there's been an internet, there's been ways for people to sneak out listens of an album well before its release date. Often, leaks were of poor quality, but in the post-Napster era, the sound quality of these leaks has increased to the point where record labels have rapid response teams trying to plug up unlawfully posted material whenever possible. Some artists just put the album out after a leak goes live, while others shift their release dates to confuse any potential leakers. Yet some artists have gone a different route and leaked fake versions of their music to throw crafty internet users off the scent. In 2008, Ben Folds got ahead of hackers by posting nine tracks of his then-upcoming "Way to Normal" on forums, having recorded goofy, hackneyed versions of his own songs as part of the spin. (Recording these non-serious joke tracks was so fun, one of these goofs made the real album cut.) Madonna, for her part, tried to get ahead of leaks for her 2003 album "American Life" by releasing a litany of MP3s that had the names of the tracks on her new album, but the actual audio was just loops of her saying, "What the f--- do you think you're doing?" over and over again. In response, a hacker defaced her official website saying, "This is what the f--- I think I'm doing," along with links to files of all her new material.

As the advent of digital file-sharing in the early 2000s caused record labels to worry about their bottom line, several methods were devised to keep hot new albums off of Kazaa and LimeWire. Chief among them was DRM, or Digital Rights Management: a method of locking compact discs so that songs couldn't be ripped into MP3s and shared illegally. It seemed like a halfway decent measure but ended up being a miserable failure. Technologies like "Key2Audio" were developed to ensure that CD albums were only played as CDs. The only issue? By adding these new layers of protection, these discs were closer to being classified as CD-ROMs instead of CDs, and thus, multiple hardware devices didn't recognize them and were unable to play them (car stereos being the worst offenders). Workarounds like drawing a felt-tip pen around the outside rim of a CD (where this DRM technology was housed) were all it took to get these records to play properly, thereby meaning that DRM was an expensive waste of everyone's time.

There have long been instrumental and even karaoke versions of pop songs available, although karaoke tracks are made from scratch and not officially licensed. Similarly, there have been groups capable of doing offbeat covers of other artists, with Vitamin Records' "String Quartet Tributes" to acts like Tool, Björk, and Led Zeppelin becoming immensely popular. Following the success of the "Now That's What I Call Music!" series, Kidz Bop was created to provide kid-sung, family-friendly versions of popular songs. If it sounds annoying, it's because it is annoying, but Kidz Bop has found a cult audience all its own. Was Bruno Mars saying "I'm too hot / Hot damn!" too much for you? The Kidz Bop Kidz(?) sing it but have changed the lyric to the less-incendiary "Hot yeah!" It became an industry unto itself, netting a string of Gold-certified albums in the early 2000s and still scoring viral YouTube hits to this day. Similarly, the "Rockabye Baby!" series of albums have been released, wherein popular artists' instrumental lullaby versions of songs are used to keep infants both sleepy and hip. Lull your child into a slumber with lullaby renditions of Imagine Dragons, The Tragically Hip, and Wu-Tang Clan. You can never love the Wu-Tang too early.

While many "deluxe editions" and compilations and B-sides are now readily available on DSPs, there are still the rare oddities that can only be found on rare physical versions, and you can bet a crate-digger is going to spend some hard-earned money to find them. Rock music, in particular, is prone to a special degree of fetishization, as owning an album and singles isn't enough: you must also grab the B-sides, EPs, rare soundtrack cuts, etc., to get the full breadth of an artist's output. Sometimes, an artist's best song might be a one-off or relegated to the status of the "Japanese bonus track." In Japan, as it's more expensive to import albums from Western artists, domestic releases tend to have additional goodies/rarities printed on which become collector's items for an artist's fanbase. While "deluxe editions" are a beast all their own, bonus or hidden tracks can be a way to incentivize customers to purchase one or multiple copies of a beloved long-player. For Blink-182's 2001 effort "Take Off Your Pants and Jacket", three editions were created where each edition housed two completely different bonus tracks (the only way to be sure of what version you're buying is by looking at the sticker printed over the CD plastic wrap). So while bonus tracks don't mean as much in the streaming era, there was a time when they could be weaponized to milk every "bonus" dollar from willing customers.

Over the years, there have been many one-offs or specialty media players and music services, chief among them being Neil Young's HD-catering Pono music player, which had a good five-year run. Young banked on his device's appeal by having his own music (and archives) on the platform as a way of catering to the more discriminating music fan, but his service at least provided a litany of other artist's records to browse through as well. When Kanye West launched his bizarre Stem Player in 2021, it was met with wild skepticism, as while it could support other albums and allowed fans to mix, loop, and echo their music; the physical interface was clunky. While other tracks are available on the player, its chief reason for existing was for fans to hear Kanye's 2022 record "Donda 2", which was released through the Stem Player only and received scathing reviews. The $200 price point was prohibitive to many, and the lack of selections beyond the recent works of Kanye West certainly limited its appeal. There have been ego-driven attempts at alternative music-hosting platforms, and there will be more in the future, but few got the bad press that the Stem Player received.

Evan Sawdey is the Interviews Editor at PopMatters and is the host of The Chartographers, a music-ranking podcast for pop music nerds. He lives in Chicago with his wonderful husband and can be found on Twitter at @SawdEye.

Get the latest news and rumors, customized to your favorite sports and teams. Emailed daily. Always free!