With All Those Music Videos.. How did Beyoncé Pull off such a Secret?![DETAILS Here]

As VanityFair.com’s lead Beyoncé correspondent Josh Duboff wrote this morning, Mrs. Carter may have pulled off one of the most covert operations in music history by dropping a fully-fleshed surprise album (with accompanying music videos) at the stroke of midnight. Not only was it an unprecedented move for the industry, but especially one for Beyoncé, who has showed no qualms in the past about, say, baiting her fan base with a six-second video clip teaserfor what would turn out to be an extended Pepsi commercial. (And as Mr. Beyoncé showed us earlier this year with Magna Carta Holy Grail’s Samsung distribution deal, the Knowles-Carter household isn’t exactly opposed to weirdly extravagant, multi-platform release strategies either.) So when Beyoncé—the $50 million Pepsi spokeswoman who is not above shilling the world’s lesser cola to her fans—suddenly (and we admit, ingeniously) drops a surprise album and claims that she wants to give fans a gift directly (a gift, that in spite of the description, still costs $15.99), cutting out the middle man, your blogger is a tad suspicious.

Regardless of where you and I fall on the spectrum of Beyoncé appreciation though, we have got to respect the covertness of her latest musical coming-out. After all, we live in an era when our stars can barely send an email or run an errand without being hacked, paparazzi attacked, or sold out by a confidante to the highest tabloid bidder. For once, TMZ did not even manage to scoop this story through its smarmy thug tactics, even though Beyoncé actually included a TMZ employee in one of her videos. (Hat tip to both Bey and Sandra Bullock, with that whole surprise adoption thing, for being perhaps the only two stars to defeat TMZ.)

But just how did camp Beyoncé pull off the epic album release—which reportedly resulted in 80,000 downloads in its first three hours in spite of no promotion whatsoever? Ahead some clues about how the Grammy winner was able to pull off her sneaky album release:

• Per Billboard’s report this morning, the release was such a heavily-shrouded secret that “only a dozen or so members of her Sony Records family were even aware” of the exact drop date.
• Collaborators, including Beyoncé’s dancers, barely even knew what they were working on. One of the dancers, Morgan Hebert, has since told TMZ that she and several of Beyoncé’s back-up dancers from the Super Bowl flew to Houston in September for a two-day shoot. Hebert reveals that she was not entirely sure that the footage would be used for a music video and was asked to abide by a series of secrecy tactics—including signing a “scary confidentiality agreement” and not bringing phones or cameras to set.
• Similar types of confidentiality agreements for all—or else just serious trust with (or blackmail leverage against) other collaborators. The successful secrecy of Beyoncé is even more surprising when you consider the celebrity cameos in the new Beyoncé videos, and how no tabloid reporter or photographer caught wind of the collaborations. They include Jay-Z, Blue Ivy (!), Harvey Keitel, Pharrell, models Joan Small and Chanel Iman, and Kelly Rowland. In fact, the album’s release was so under-the-radar that many of her collaborators on the album including Pharrell, Justin Timberlake, and Timbaland have not even referenced the album on their social media accounts as of Friday afternoon.
• Come to think of it, it has been a little eerie that no one, not even Columbia Records chairman Rob Stringer earlier this week, was willing to even estimate a time frame for the Grammy winner’s new album. When Stringer was asked point blank by Rolling Stone about a release date, he played coy: “At some point, Beyoncé will put a record out, and when she does, it will be monumental.” Perhaps he meant monumental in the release-strategy sense of the word. Maybe we should have been suspicious all along?

While sadly little else is known about the covert operation, we imagine that disposable cell phones, disguises, secret locations, and code words were used to execute this plan with government-level secrecy. We wonder whether Julian Asssange—hacker extraordinaire—ever attempted to crack Beyoncé’s e-mail system. (Maybe he did, and was so delighted by the idea of a surprise album and the giddy joy that it would give her fanbase that, for once, he opted to play along with the secret.) Whatever it was, and whatever it entailed, we can only do one thing now that the Beyoncé album is a secret no longer: pray that the plot is milked for all of its entertainment potential in a forthcoming HBO documentary.