![]() ![]() Miley Cyrus’s listless country reinvention “Malibu” failed to make even a fraction of the impact that “Wrecking Ball” did just a few years ago. In the fickle realm of the hit single, other big-budget sure things faltered even worse than Swift did. ![]() But the album’s failure to produce an enduring song thus far-one that understood the sneaky spontaneity with which the best songs wormed their way into the zeitgeist this year-proves that the hit single is now, in the streaming age, the playground of the oddball underdog just as much as the mega-famous pop star. (It also had the steepest fall from the top five in the 27-year history of Billboard’s radio play chart.) The success of Reputation proves that, on the album chart at least, some artists like Swift remain too big to fail. 7 in a single week, and in the time since has continued to plummet. 1, Billboard reported that the song had “the largest fall from the top” in the history of the pop songs chart it slipped from no. Its quick descent on the charts speaks to this: Though it rode the wave of the comeback-single boost to debut at no. The phone containing “Ll0oK What U Made Me D0” was not exactly going to fall out of Swift’s pocket in a mosh pit.Īnd yet, as much as the old-fashioned rollout worked for Reputation (which would go on to sell nearly 1.3 million copies in its first week), everything about the release of “Look What You Made Me Do” felt fascinatingly out of touch with the way hit songs happened in 2017. The release of its lead single, “Look What You Made Me Do,” was as finely orchestrated as a perfectionist’s dinner party: a week of Instagram teasers, an appointment release on a Thursday night, a debut of the full-length music video at MTV’s Video Music Awards that weekend. Her team eventually squelched the rumor but, in retrospect, it’s more likely that the heavily guarded box contained something having to do with the top-secret music on her meticulously planned album Reputation, which would be announced a month later. In July, for a brief and delicious afternoon, there was a rumor circulating that Taylor Swift was being transported to and from her apartment in a gigantic utility suitcase. To the millions of listeners sick of songs that feel focus-grouped to death before they even reach radio, the casually serendipitous origin story of “XO Tour Llif3” was a crucial part of its appeal.Ĭonsider the complete opposite of this strategy. Uzi proved that, in 2017, the leak was nothing to fear: When it was finally released through the proper channels in late August, Luv Is Rage 2 still debuted at no. Uzi’s cut was about a fifth of that.) In the not-so-distant-past, a major label would have taken great pains to keep a song like “XO Tour Llif3” from hitting SoundCloud too early (or at all), lest it diminish the traditional sales of that all-important major label debut. (It also made his label a mint: In September, one report estimated that Atlantic had made $4.5 million off of those streams. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100, and across platforms it has been streamed more than 1.3 billion times. A lilting, dark, singsongy trap ditty about death wishes and the nihilism of a particularly bad lover’s quarrel-“I don’t really care if you cryyyy … All my friends are dead, push me to the edge” -“XO Tour Llif3” eventually went to no. Leaking music funded by a major label is the sort of behavior that, even just a few years ago, might have gotten a new artist dropped from his deal. It was called “XO Tour Llif3.” All these months later, it stands as one of the defining singles of 2017. He did it so quickly that one of the song titles was dotted with some typos he didn’t bother to fix. Figuring whoever swiped the phone would leak them anyway, Uzi went back to his hotel and took matters into his own hands, uploading to SoundCloud everything he’d recorded from those sessions. The finished songs from those sessions were on that phone. This was not as big a deal to the perpetually nonplussed Uzi-the headline of his F ader cover story was “Lil Uzi Vert Can’t Be Bothered”-but it was indeed a huge deal to his management and his new label, Atlantic Records, who had recently paid a lot of money for Uzi and his crew to stay in a mansion in Hawaii while writing and recording material for his forthcoming major label debut. Afterward, he checked his pockets and realized his phone was missing. In February, in Geneva, the Philadelphia rapper Lil Uzi Vert stage-dove into the audience at one of his shows.
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