morgan wallen

J0rdan, thank you for breaking down the album sales; I agree the bump doesn't seem as significant when viewed that way (even if you would hope that 0% of an artist's fan base would make "protest buys" in that situation).

― Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Wayne Manor (morrisp), Thursday, May 11, 2023 11:27 AM (forty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, I was tellin J0 that if someone told me the % of people that would immediately stop or start listening to an artist as a response to a controversy was 3%, I would find that stat totally believable. I still hear MJ all the time. Chappelle stays touring arenas. People without online brainworms don't have the time nor inclination to litigate this shit then translate it into an informed consumer decision

I think a lot about when Seinfeld went on Letterman and let Michael Richards do his apology and had to go IT'S NOT FUNNY! STOP LAUGHING! because the audience of New York tourists had no fucking clue what Kramer was on about

xpost yes, it's not like the video came after his album had fallen off the charts. Those post-video sales were also coming off of an on-going promotional campaign.

yes, and it didn't fall off the charts after those 9 days either. it spent 10 weeks at #1 on the Billboard 200 and 15 weeks on top of the country chart.

It's the longest running top ten album in history.

Beyoncé said "sp*z" and her album was immediately knocked from number one by Bad Bunny. Makes you think.

Eminem did not get wiped from playlisting. Neither did xxx, neither did Kodak, and neither does Kim Petras. Chris brown is playlisted all the time. Of the younger artists mentioned, ie the ones relevant to the current cultural paradigm, their careers were at the very least *set back* by what happened. Kodak is not at the center of the genre in the way this guy is to his. Tay k’s career is in jail so I’m not sure what the point of bringing that up is.

If your point is that anti social behavior can bolster artists in other genres, no shit .. that’s exactly what I meant when I brought up drill. But it does feel like country music fans rallied around this guy in a way that reflects an anti-woke industry dynamic, in a way that has lead to him being the leading voice in the genre

Obviously, as I said earlier, not all of them would explain it as “anti woke” or frame it in those terms, but it’s fundamentally underlying his continued success in a way I maintain you guys are being far too dismissive about

i have access to luminate (formerly nielsen), the company that tabulates all data for billboard charts, bcuz of my work. here is the streaming and airplay data from the 8 weeks starting w/ dangerous being released and continuing on past the slur video. this is catalog data meaning streams for both dangerous & all his previous records

notes: the dates here are all the final day of data counting for the given week. "radio audience" is a measure based on the number of radio spins. i don't feel like digging into each's week data to look at how many spins he did, but just for reference in the first week where he had a "radio audience" of 68 million that was equal to roughly 20,000 spins. and these are "on demand" streams, US only, meaning apple, spotify, youtube, pandora etc

1/14/21 (dangerous first week)

259 million streams / 68 million radio audience

1/21/21

194 million streams / 61 million radio audience

1/28/21

172 million streams / 59 million radio audience

*tmz video is posted feb 2*

2/4/21

180 million streams / 42 million radio audience

2/11/21

171 million streams / 1.2 million radio audience

2/18/21

131 million streams / 1.1 million radio audience

2/25/21

130 million streams / 1.2 million radio audience

3/4/21

122 million streams / 1.9 million radio audience

so yes, it's true that there was a slight streaming uptick in the tracking period that encompassed the first three days (feb 2/3/4) after the video's release. but by the next tracking period the streams had dipped back down to the number from the week prior to the video, and three weeks after that he had lost 50 million streams. if you extend it out another month -- to the tracking period ending on 4/8/21 -- he did 100 million streams. his streaming numbers were in decline every week through the tracking period ending on 5/20/21, when he did 89 million streams. so his streaming numbers essentially were cut in half in the ~3 months following the slur. you see the first uptick the next week (5/28/21), where he jumps from 89 million streams to 91 million streams. this seems to coincide with his first public performance (on 5/19/21) since the slur, but it dropped down the next period, and for the period ending on 6/10/21 he was under 85 million.

for everyone's sake i'll stop here, but the data beyond just the first week shows that his streams were cut pretty severely over time. he's continued to be a massive star setting all sorts of album chart records but that's because he was already starting from the insane heights reached when he released dangerous (260 million streams).

what that first week data really shows is that when a musician is in the news because of a controversy, people are basically reminded to listen to their music. frank ocean was brought up as an example earlier. here is a post on jezebel looking at different cancelled artists & their streaming data... r kelly's streams had a spike in the week following his gayle king interview, for instance

https://jezebel.com/these-musicians-were-canceled-but-people-kept-listenin-1840150589

for reference, last week wallen did 260 million streams. so you could maybe say his audience has returned to where it was when he dropped dangerous, but these are cumulative numbers including another 36 song album, so if his audience was completely unaffected -- or had grown -- we would probably expect to see even higher numbers

and just for fun here are last week's catalog numbers (US only) for some major artists if anyone is interested

taylor swift -- 317 million
morgan wallen -- 260 million
drake -- 194 million
the weeknd -- 113 million
sza -- 104 million
bad bunny -- 60 million

and now i should get back to my actual job...

Had no idea chastising country fans was a felony

https://i.ibb.co/RDkRH8C/Screenshot-20240408-152410.jpg

This guy may have a problem.

Apparently he threw a chair from the top of a sixth story rooftop bar down to the street below.

he did. the felony comes from almost hitting two cops (so I guess he has some redeeming qualities amidst the awfulness)

off a six-story building ... damn, dude is fortunate he's not facing assault or manslaughter or whatever.

I feel like there should be a term for dropping things off a building onto cops

Morgan Baller

what a dope. glad no one was hurt.

I'm surprised the cops didn't open fire, mistaking the chair for falling acorns.

What color was the chair?

So this was at Eric Church's bar. I wonder if it's classier than Kid Rock's bar (where Wallen was also arrested.)

I Love This Bar (But Not This Chair) and Grill

tbf He mistook the chair for Obama

I'm especially glad no one was hurt/killed because I cannot think of a worse evening than blowing money in Nashville's most obnoxious tourist trap bars and then being crushed by a chair thrown by Morgan Wallen

that's one for the epitaph

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Nh-NsqBsGE

lol

All the obvious signs of a dickhead with a drinking problem. Which obviously is in line with the male-country-singer canon, but throwing a chair off the roof of Eric Church's dumb bar is hardly the stuff of George Jones legend. Try harder.

He could drive a riding mower off the roof of Eric Church's dumb bar.

then it might land on someone

The cops could cordon off the block

Cool. I don't care if anything happens to Morgan Waffen

It would be the best thing he's ever done.

Foreshadowing!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GOkEmhQucY