How Beyoncé was able to keep her album a secret

Curious how Beyoncé kept her self-titled new album a secret? Her producer Noah "40" Shebib and other music industry experts spoke to Rolling Stone about how the secret "visual album" came to be.

Shebib, who was pressured to get his mixing completed, said he received a call from his studio the night the album dropped. "My manger called me last night. 'It's out! Beyoncé! We're all just putting out iTunes."

As RS notes, the 14-song, 17-video Beyoncé hit iTunes Thursday night with nothing more than a press release and a banner at the top of the iTunes store. According to Billboard, the album sold 80,000 copies within three hours.

"Many other artists who aren't of Beyoncé's stature would not have been able to get this done and move it through the system this quickly," Syd Schwartz, a former EMI Music executive told RS. "She obviously had to bypass a lot of the standard mechanisms to make this work."

According to the article, Beyoncé chose to work exclusively with iTunes in order to maintain secrecy and avoid having to negotiate with other venders.

"The hard part is keeping it a secret, when you're Beyoncé's size," Schwartz told them. "A very small number of people in her inner circle must have known about this."

The album was recorded this past summer with a star-studded lineup of songwriters and producers, including Justin Timberlake, Sia, Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic, Frank Ocean, Miguel and The-Dream. According to the article, all Shebib knew about the album was that Beyoncé wanted to get it out by Christmas.

"It was brilliant. You spend no marketing dollars, essentially. To hold that together and not let that out of the bag is very, very impressive. It's not easy to do," Shebib says. "Everybody was surprised. Everybody. It wasn't just the fans."

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