He's very dependent on hits to carry him through album cycles. If he doesn't score a smash hit with an album, the album flops.

Both After Hours and Dawn FM did 60 million first day on Spotify, which is exactly what Guts did.

Also SOS did 67, but it was a 23 track album

Basing this off zero evidence other than Dawn FM is actually insane, considering the fact that Dawn FM didn’t even flop

Where them o rod numbers

after hours did about a million more units than dawnfm did in a year

After Hours has one of the biggest songs of all time on it, not really fair to use that as a standard

It’s like saying every Drake project since 2017 is a flop because it didn’t do Views numbers first week

Jimmy Buffett?

i said overall for a reason. ☠️

first week streaming wise dawn did slightly less than affer hours though. 134k vs 169k

scorpion and views are both over 8 million. CLB isnt old enough to catch them yet. HNVM flopped but its not same genre.

I just think it’s foolish to say he needs a hit for an album to not flop, when there’s only one project of his post-2015 that you can argue underperformed, and even then it really didn’t

I’m going to train an Ai bot purely on the discourse between Cardi stans and Nicki stans under sales tweets

yea my bad I meant the US, not global. Weeknd albums struggle compared to those artists in the US but do really well globally

How didnt it flop though? Olivia, Summer Walker and SZA all streaming way more than it first week makes it a flop to me. That shouldn't be happening.

SZA over doubled Dawn FM's streams first week.. 309k units vs 134k. For whatever reason all of The Weeknd's insane success with AH didn't translate into people bothering to listen to the new album. And I just don't understand why. How can you sell out stadiums but then not get your audience listening to your new s***

You can use the excuse oh they were busy listening to AH still but Morgan Wallen and Taylor Swift both blow that excuse out of the water surely. It's just like The Weeknd's fans don't care too much about new music until it gets radio play. AH had poor streaming numbers too even with BL being crazy big

it's not even like that album had good longterm performance either, 1.06m units in 2022, less than 500k this year

1. SOS was SZA’s first album in six years, and was her first album since her mainstream breakthrough.

2. Morgan Wallen is only entering the prime of his career, and even still One Thing At a Time is 36 tracks long, comparing the streaming numbers of that album to a 12 track album is foolish.

3. Taylor has clearly been playing in a league of her own this decade, she could release a silent album and it would break 500K.

Like others have been saying for months, it’s pretty clear and pretty easily explainable why Dawn FM wasn’t the massive success that After Hours was, and it has nothing to do with people caring or not caring about new music from The Weeknd. For some reason, it’s only others on this site that keep trying to spread the narrative that the album was some massive failure.

Also, he didn’t start selling out stadiums until six months after that album released, not before.

People go craziest about albums when they’re by artists who

• are known for their relatable quotables and stories
• are known to have most of the deep cuts rival the singles in catchiness

We see this especially in the current streaming era. The Weeknd, while being an “albums artist” artistically, is not someone who checks off either of these. Doesn’t really speak to quality just types of appeal imo

Nicki isn't better lmao

she wasn't mentioned either ☠️

why would they not drop the acapella

🐐

It's crazy man. That first excuse was the exact excuse people used for Kendrick not streaming much lol, saying oh he's fallen outta people's rotations, so people don't care anymore. I'd put a lot of money on SZA being able to drop another album in a month and still sell similar number. Majority of artists that do numbers are ones that drop regularly

Plus After Hours was The Weeknd's first actual album in 4 years too, yet it still streamed like ass compared to all these other artists. So it don't add up. Plus AH streams were basically the same as Summer Walker's "Still Over It"... which was released just 2 years after her first album. Like I said, it don't add up lol

When I brought up Taylor/Morgan I was more talking about how I've seen some people say Dawn FM didn't do that well cause people were still busy listening to AH but it seems like cope to me. Just seems like he doesn't have a fanbase that's rabid for new music

The Weeknd is a pop artist now. Besides Taylor, no pop artists are streaming like crazy first week nowadays. This is common knowledge. Look at any major pop release of the past couple years that’s not a Taylor Swift record.

Pop is about the long game