Ow, my ears.
Moderator Note
HaroldMiller, it’s not going to matter in a few hours, but please don’t use oversized fonts on this site. I have edited your post to a smaller font.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
DJs were dropping beats as early as the late 80s. It’s no surprise they started dropping entire songs and albums a decade later.
Here’s a use of “drop” in talking about albums from 1994:
Billy Barty font isnt any better. 
I’d always assumed it had to do with dropping the needle onto the record.
The Beastie Boys were known to let the beat …hmm drop in 1986.
I feel like I heard hip hop artists say it in the 1990s.
Now everything “drops.” It’s become one of those words that is so overused that I’ve started to resent it.
Can’t some things be released or issued or made available or put on the market? Nope. Everything drops. Yuk.
I worked retail vinyl and CD sales 1970s and 1980s. Never heard of the term until last 10 or so years. Even that mostly referred to hit “singles” dropping and social media implications.
My impression, which may or may not be correct, is that nowadays when something “drops” that means it becomes available to stream/download/etc. As opposed to a movie which appears in theaters, or a physical recording that is available in stores, or an old-fashioned TV show which is aired one episode at a time. When, say, a digital album or a Netflix series drops, that’s when people have access to it.
In my experience, it’s not restricted to that context. Just yesterday, I heard someone say it with regard to the availability of a new kitchen appliance. Some new coffee machine or something had “dropped” recently.
I’ve heard the word “drop” used this way in the IT/software world. When the software vendor has a new executable or patch ready for you, they drop it, and then you can install it.