Led Zeppelin and Jack White’s new album Released…

The ploy of releasing an album without any advance warning comes into play when an artist feels they are being paid either too much or too little attention. The stealth arrival of Jack White’s new solo album falls firmly into the second category.

Putting out music in this way ensures additional media coverage and a certain level of intrigue

I didn’t love White’s old band, the White Stripes, back when they were a garage-rock/blues revival phenomenon in the early 2000s. Since their demise in 2011, the world seems to be coming around to this way of thinking. Their most successful albums, Elephant and White Blood Cells, hold little cultural currency these days. The band’s moment of ascendancy now seems almost dream-like, a vacuum-filling kink in the musical ecosystem, while White’s subsequent solo career has failed to set the world alight.

Time, then, for a back-to-basics reset. Two weeks ago, customers at Third Man Records shops in Detroit, Nashville and London received a complimentary 12-inch vinyl record with their paid-for purchases. The LP came in a white sleeve with the words ‘No Name’ printed on the cover. No artist or song titles were listed.

It rapidly transpired that the mysterious vinyl artefact was White’s sixth solo album (I’ll offer a modest cash prize for anyone who can name the previous five without using Google). Fans were encouraged to rip the 13 tracks and share them online – which is how I heard the album. Putting out music in this way ensures additional media coverage and a certain level of intrigue, even excitement, around an album which, had it been announced months in advance accompanied by reams of hyperbole, would have struggled to raise a shrug.

A surprise album can still drum up attention, though the effectiveness of the technique has diminished through overuse. As with most things, we can blame – or thank – the internet. Radiohead took the initiative in 2007 with In Rainbows, which the band announced on their blog – how quaint – just ten days prior to its release. Initially sold online via a pay-what-you-want system, In Rainbows offered a glimpse of a potentially radical new arrangement for music distribution, one where artists recorded music independently and released it directly to their fans, bypassing the labels. This promised revolution hasn’t yet occurred. Although the direct-to-fans model is, largely through necessity, followed by many lower-profile artists, the big names have tended to stick with the economies of scale and PR power offered by traditional record companies.