Working for the Weeknd

It's the first Friday of 2022 and the year's first potential blockbuster album has arrived and it's an optimistic(ish) synth-poppy dance-through-the-darkness concept album set inside a metaphoric tunnel with a fictional radio DJ played by JIM CARREY serving as our not so metaphoric guide. And not to read too much into a coincidence (I think) of timing, but it technically arrived on Thursday, in the waning hours of the first anniversary of one of the darker days in American history, and the strong-willed, free-thinking Canadian pop star who made it seemed to almost be saying, "I know a way out, follow me." RIYL: DEPECHE MODE, MICHAEL JACKSON, PRINCE (I mean, that album title), and, why not, one of the tracks is co-written and co-produced by a BEACH BOY.

It's Friday, it's the dawn, it's the WEEKND, there will be thinkpieces and there will be threads.

Dangerous Consumption

The most consumed album of 2021 in the US, according to MRC DATA, was MORGAN WALLEN's double album DANGEROUS, which shouldn't come as a surprise—it was the #1 album in the country for 10 weeks—and is the result, I believe, of three factors: 1) Wallen's personally disastrous 2021 notwithstanding, it's a really good country album, catchy and loaded with both character and characters. 2) When radio put him on ice for the first few months of the year and seemingly half the country was (justifiably) demanding reflection and atonement, the other half was buying physical copies and downloads of an album they had no other way of hearing, and reveling in the political statement the simple purchase of a piece of music allowed them to make. 3) It came out the first week of January, giving it a 10-month head start on ADELE's 2021 album.

Other notes on MRC Data's (fka NIELSEN SOUNDSCAN), year-end report: The year's most streamed (and overall most consumed) song was DUA LIPA's "LEVITATING." At #2 and #3: OLIVIA RODRIGO's "DRIVERS LICENSE" and "GOOD 4 U." The best-selling song was BTS' "BUTTER"... Americans are consuming catalog albums waaaaay more than new ones. Music Business Worldwide's TIM INGHAM crunched MRC's numbers and calculated that in the second half of 2021, catalog albums accounted for 82 percent of all album consumption in the US. One more reason, in case you needed one, for why classic publishing catalogs and masters are trading for hundreds of millions of dollars. JOHN LEGEND has added his name to the seller column, with Bloomberg reporting Thursday that KKR CREDIT ADVISORS and BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT each bought a 50 percent share in all his copyrights through the beginning of 2021. The price wasn't disclosed. Billboard says PHIL COLLINS is quietly shopping his solo and GENESIS copyrights with an asking price "upwards of $200 million"... Compact disc sales were up year over year for the first time in almost two decades, but that doesn't necessarily mean a CD revival is around the corner. The 2021 figures represented only a slight rebound from 2020, when the bottom fell out of the market during the first year of the pandemic. The long-term trend appears to still be pointing downward, and for the first time since Nielsen began tracking sales in 1991, vinyl sales passed CD sales last year. *That* revival appears a lot more solid.

Like We Said, It's Friday

And besides the Weekend's "Dawn FM," that means new music from GUNNA (joined by Drake, Future, Young Thug, 21 Savage and half the rest of the known hip-hop world), BURIAL (officially not an album, just a really long EP), WAXAHATCHEE (her soundtrack to the Apple+ series "El Deafo"), DAVID BOWIE (first standalone release of "Toy," an album of turn-of-the-millennium sessions originally released as part of the 2021 box "Brilliant Adventure"), CLAIRE DICKSON (jazz vocalist/composer's concept album recorded in part on a ship in the Arctic Circle), TONY MALABY'S SABINO (counterpoint to previous parentheses: jazz saxophonist's album grew from pandemic performances under the New Jersey Turnpike), FRED HERSCH, MONTANA OF 300, the WOMBATS, AITIS BAND, TWIN ATLANTIC, OMEGA X, ERIC NAM, RU PAUL, THANKS FOR COMING, VULFPECK, WILDERUN, DEAF CLUB and INFECTED RAIN.

Rest in Peace

JUDITH DAVIDOFF, a classical cellist and master of pre-Classical stringed instruments... Denver jazz bassist PAUL WARBURTON... Director PETER BOGDANOVICH, who never won an Academy Award during his lengthy Hollywood career but did own a Grammy, for his fun, breezy and slightly long Tom Petty documentary, "Runnin' Down a Dream."