A Look Back At Kanye West’s G.O.O.D Fridays

By: Papa Minnow

Kanye West has been a pioneer in the Hip-Hop landscape the moment he entered the game. He shifted the rules of rap and was able to tap into a whole new era of listeners while still gaining the respect of the established rappers before him.

In 2010, West made yet another ground breaking industry move that still has relevance today. Prior to the release of his fifth studio album, My Dark Beautiful Twisted Fantasy, the Chicago-native rapper invented a rollout where he released several album quality songs as singles with featured artists every Friday.

These songs made their appearance exclusively on West’s website kanyetothe.com but would eventually leak onto the internet. Some of the appeal of West’s rollout was in creating exclusivity for Kanye fans who were tapped into the mixtape era.

At this point in time, the mainstream music industry was struggling with piracy issues and they were losing sales on singles and physically purchased albums. In hip-hop, mixtapes had major appeal because it gave artists full creativity and flexibility to put out the music they wanted directly to their fans.

Mixtapes were so good that fans began to lose interest in studio albums due to the pressures of labels that were seeking wide spread appeal. Kanye’s G.O.O.D Fridays series bridged that gap as they appealed to mixtape fans but the rollout still bolstered mainstream anticipation for MBDTF.

This idea worked so well because it was a direct to consumer approach and fans knew that every Friday they would get a brand new Kanye song that would likely be good. Not only that, but the final payoff was the release of a polished MBDTF with a mystery of songs.

In the end, MBDTF was critically acclaimed and to this day is still held as one of the greatest albums ever released in the last decade.

Here’s a list of G.O.O.D Friday releases that didn’t make the album.