For music fans, Friday will be a busy day

Owl City, Tyrese and Veruca Salt all have new albums this week, but they’ll come out on Friday, the new standard release day for albums worldwide.

Experts say the move to a standardized release day is more logical in a music industry increasingly driven by digital sales and streaming. Previously, albums were released Fridays in Australia, Mondays in the U.K. and Tuesdays in the U.S. and Canada.

“These release dates and territorial constraints come from an oldfashioned mentality of physical albums being delivered to brickand-mortar retailers around the world,” says Keith Caulfield, Billboard’s co-director of charts.” That’s an outdated way of thinking of things when everything’s so instantaneous.”

Cutting that wait time also could lessen the demand for pirated music. “If an album leaked the Thursday or Friday before” a Tuesday North American release, says Universal Music Group Nashville senior vice president Tom Becci, “you could see the piracy ramp up dramatically over the weekend. You really needed a global street date to combat that.”

Promotional schedules for top acts also could be affected by the change. Before this week’s change, Caulfield says, artists had almost a full week to promote an album globally. But “if your album is coming out at the same time around the world, how do you route an artist to appear in different places at once? That’ll be a challenge for artists and labels used to a staggered release week.”

Billboard will shift its salesbased charts to accommodate the new release day. Now, it will track both albums and individual tracks on a Friday-to-Thursday sales week, as opposed to the Tuesdaythrough-Monday cycle it has used since 1991.

While the new system may be digital-friendly, it creates challenges for retailers, which will want to have enough stock onhand to get them through a busy weekend when distributors aren’t delivering. “Having a release date on a Tuesday would give you enough time to sell through a record that was really hot early in the week and still get more in time for the weekend,” says Mike Turner, manager at Wuxtry Records in Athens, Ga. “Now, you’ll have to anticipate way more.”

But on a positive note, “there are far more people in the stores on weekends,” says Nielsen Entertainment analyst David Bakula. “Friday is a day when everybody’s about to go out for the weekend with money in their pocket. That’s great for music.”