Hits
Olivia Rodrigo has added another million copies to her album sales with great ease, in less than a month. ‘You seem pretty sad for a girl so in love’ will, once again, be among the year’s best-selling albums, just as her first two releases did.
That this time the long-player’s run isn’t yielding a clearly dominant international number-one in singles as clear as ‘Vampire’ on ‘GUTS’ or ‘drivers license’ or ‘good 4 u’ on ‘SOUR’ doesn’t leave any sense of failure, because Olivia’s new album is performing in a cohesive way overall. Among its 13 tracks only ‘purple’ and ‘cigarette smoke’ stand out a bit differently. The rest is close to surpassing 100 million streams on Spotify.
‘You seem pretty sad for a girl so in love’ has topped the charts in every major market around the world except Japan. That means it secured the No. 1 spot in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Spain, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and many others. In fact, it has already been certified gold in four markets: the United Kingdom, Canada, Spain and New Zealand.
But the best part is how strongly it remains in its sixth week: still top 3 in the UK, still top 2 in the United States. Although it’s true that this time the songs will take a bit longer to reach 1,000 million streams on Spotify (the three singles have topped Spotify’s Global chart, but for only a short period), up to seven tracks from the album continue to appear in the daily Global Top 200 a month and a half after its release.
The favorable reception of ‘stupid song’ (top 15 right now on Spotify’s Daily Global), ‘the cure’ (top 16) and ‘drop dead’ (top 23) guarantee solid sales for the rest of the year. Moreover, ‘honeybee’ (top 76) could jump up at any moment and other tracks like ‘maggots for brains’, ‘less’ or ‘expectations’ tend to surface in the top 200.
Flops
Is rock in fashion? Have electric guitars returned? It depends on who makes rock and on which kind of rock we’re talking about. Muse came after the grunge era, they never understood lo-fi, and they have nothing to do with Olivia Rodrigo’s sound.
Of course, we cannot draw any relationship between the two to conclude that the guitar has returned to the foreground. The public has completely ignored the British band’s latest release, which has disappeared from the UK top 100, their home country and main market, after just three weeks. The first week they were number 1, yes, but the second they dropped to the top 32; the third to the top 94; and the fourth didn’t exist. Never before had a Muse studio album lasted so little in the top 100.
Even worse was its performance in the United States, where the album opened at 41 and then disappeared from the Billboard 200 after only a week. Moreover, a top 41 is the worst entry for Muse in the North American market since 2003.
The Muse album has managed to reach number 1 in the Netherlands or France, number 2 in Australia and number 3 in Germany, but longevity will not be its strong suit. It faces a long struggle to repeat the gold certification that its predecessor ‘Will of the People’ achieved in the United Kingdom and the platinum this one earned in France. In fact, if things don’t change, it could be the first Muse album in history to end up without any certification at all. A pity, because artistically, it is their best album in a decade or two.
