Frank Ocean’s Long-Awaited ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ Is Due

The long wait for a new Frank Ocean album may nearly be over.

Mr. Ocean, the innovative and enigmatic R&B singer, is set to release his next album, “Boys Don’t Cry,” on Friday through an exclusive deal with Apple Music, according to a person with knowledge of the release plans. The release is also expected to include a major video and a printed publication called “Boys Don’t Cry” that will be distributed at Apple stores.

Mr. Ocean’s album is expected to remain exclusive to Apple for only two weeks before becoming more widely available, according to that person, who was not authorized to discuss the release plans and therefore spoke on condition of anonymity. But it is another coup for Apple, which has struck a series of deals with artists including Drake, Future, Chance the Rapper and the band The 1975, that have each given the company’s streaming service an early lock on a hot new record.

A spokesman for Mr. Ocean’s label, Def Jam, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Boys Don’t Cry” is one of the year’s most anticipated new albums, and Mr. Ocean’s first since “Channel Orange” in 2012, which was widely hailed by critics and nominated for six Grammy Awards (it won one, for best urban contemporary album). Mr. Ocean himself first announced the new title three years ago, and seemed to play with the long wait when he included the image of an old-school library due-date slip labeled “Boys Don’t Cry” on a website connected to the album, with a series of stamped dates going back over a year. Given the number of delays the album has already had, it seems possible that Mr. Ocean could decide to put off the release beyond Friday.

On Monday, a mysterious video appeared on the same website showing a pair of workbenches in a large empty room. There was little other information — although the director Francisco Soriano briefly took credit for the video itself early Monday in an Instagram post that was later deleted — but many viewers did notice the Apple Music logo in a watermark on the feed.

Recently Mr. Ocean has mostly relegated himself to guest duty while his fans awaited a new album, popping up as an almost spectral presence on “The Life of Pablo” by Kanye West and as a co-writer on the latest album from the British singer James Blake. Mr. Ocean’s most recent solo releases are a cover of the Isley Brothers’ “At Your Best (You Are Love)” in January 2015 and “Memrise,” a skeletal lo-fi recording posted to Tumblr in November 2014.

Mr. Ocean spoke up sparingly during his retreat from music.In April, he responded to Prince’s death with a blog post. In June, after the attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando that killed 49 people, Mr. Ocean again surfaced on his personal Tumblr with a longer piece of writing.

“I heard on the news that the aftermath of a hate crime left piles of bodies on a dance floor this month,” he wrote. “Many hate us and wish we didn’t exist. Many are annoyed by our wanting to be married like everyone else or use the correct restroom like everyone else.” (In 2012, around the time of the release of “Channel Orange,” the highly private Mr. Ocean wrote a note to fans explaining that his first love had been a man, adding a personal layer to his emergence as a cult figure.)

“Boys Don’t Cry” would be the latest high-profile album to secure an exclusive deal with a major streaming service, reflecting the intense competition among Apple, Spotify and Tidal (the service controlled by Jay Z) to lure new users and ingratiate themselves with top artists.

But the business of exclusive content has itself come under attack. In a series of Twitter posts over the weekend, Mr. West said that the competition between Apple and Tidal — in which exclusives play a major part — was hurting “the music game” and asked Apple to “give Jay his check for Tidal now,” which some people saw as corroboration of rumors that Apple was interested in buying Tidal.

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