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We, as a public, need to stop treating music as sports.
Logging online every day to see supposed fans spouting chart numbers and unit sales is as sad as it is unintelligent, and a trend that continues to teeter closer and closer to being entirely anti-art. But touting first week sales to prove a point, the same way you’d point towards minutes played vs. points scored in a LeBron vs. Jordan debate, is the norm now. What, really, is the difference between Marvel Fans and Swifties?
These sales debates rarely consider cultural impact—often because I think most stans don’t have the ability to contextualize anything outside of the one singular focus they have. Nonetheless, the people parroting streaming numbers and Billboard figures are trying to win an argument, their argument just boils down to “more people have bought/seen/heard my thing than your thing, so it must be better.” We’ve been doing that for decades, of course—let’s not pretend 30 years ago the average Oasis and Blur fans weren’t keenly checking the charts, or that Billy Corgan himself wasn’t sleeping well at night knowing Pavement were a blip on the radar compared to him. There is validity in thinking about things in opposition to one another—to creating media narratives to sell records. But it all feels so singular and clinical now; it’s not about the quality of the music or what it says about you, it’s about Xs and Os.
We saw a few pointed examples of this in 2024, perhaps most prominently as brain-dead Beyoncé and Taylor Swift fans failed to comprehend in real time how Charli XCX’s BRAT could be a zeitgeist-defining cultural moment despite having a fraction of the sales. We saw albums from Dua Lipa, Maggie Rogers, girl in red, Halsey, Camila Cabello, and to some degree Kacey Musgraves, each land with a thud—Wikipedia tells me Katy Perry’s 143 debuted in the top 10 of the Billboard charts and has sold 100,000 copies, but could you have even told me she put out an album this year?
I digress.
Let’s talk about actual sports for a moment instead.
Currently, there is a debate amongst football fans about who the NFL MVP will be.
On one side, you have Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson. Jackson won this award last year, and also in 2019. Historically, it’s pretty difficult to win back-to-back MVP’s (unless you’re a Packers quarterback from the last 30 years). But Jackson is just playing at that level, commanding an unstoppable offense and putting up passing numbers that are not only undeniable but also somehow significantly better than the ones he put up in his previous MVP campaigns. Yet on the other side you have Josh Allen, the quarterback for the Bills. Allen has never won an MVP, and while certainly a lot of the momentum behind fans calling for him to win stems from the fact that Jackson has and he hasn’t, it’s worth noting that he, too, is putting up insane numbers—guiding an offense of misfit pass-catchers to greatness after losing some key players in the offseason.
The NFL MVP is about stats, yes, but it’s also about narrative. Unlike most debates, I think whoever wins, most people outside of the respective fan bases will be happy. But if Josh Allen does win, it will be because of one specific moment—a first and goal touchdown in the snow against last year’s NFC Championship San Francisco 49ers on the Sunday Night Football of Thanksgiving weekend. A failed pitch to Amari Cooper on a play that seemed dead in the water leads to a pitch back to Allen and a goal line one-handed dive that felt important in the moment and iconic immediately after. It’s the kind of image that stays with you as a fan of the sport forever. Even you, dear reader, who are likely a music fan and don’t care about sports at all, will think this moment is amazing. Sometimes, a picture is worth 1000 stats.
So, for a second, what if I did treat music as sports? Not the way that stans do, but in painting a picture of narrative and numbers coming together in harmony.
Chappell Roan’s 2024 MVP campaign wrapped up on Thursday, August 1st at 5 p.m. CST, where on the T-Mobile stage at Lollapalooza, aerial footage of her performance showed a crowd so large it would’ve made January 6th feel like a house party. Let’s not even consider the actual show, which itself was a honed-in festival spectacle. That top-down shot alone ensured her already inevitable Grammy nominations, future headline opportunities, and the kind of mythic pop star moment that many dream of but very few achieve.
Roan has been sitting somewhere outside much of the aforementioned sales and stats conversations for a while now—certainly the idea of units moved, as it relates to her massive breakthrough, THE RISE AND FALL OF A MIDWEST PRINCESS, is an okay way to frame her come up; the steady rise in sales for both the album and its many singles is easy enough to track since its release in September of 2023, and it paints a good picture of what patience and virality can do for genuinely good music (at least as it relates to major labels). In that, it’s refreshing to consider that relatively speaking the old ways of promoting records still work—proper A&R, a great direct support slot opening for Olivia Rodrigo, a lengthy single rollout, a contentious old school relationship with the press, crossover dance moves that don’t live exclusively on TikTok and can be parodied on SNL… the list goes on.
Each of these pieces are of course privileged opportunities to be had, but nothing is for certain in this business of show. While Halsey was unsuccessfully taking swings with THE GREAT IMPERSONATOR parody marketing, and Camila Cabello was allegedly putting out music (allegedly), Chappell Roan was letting talking heads debate her comments on Kamala Harris while her year-old album had its best sales week to date. She simply was in a different stratosphere than any other artist this year—and that’s not even acknowledging “Good Luck Babe,” a perfect pop song that at once somehow channels Kate Bush and Stevie Nicks, updated for the year 2024. And I know, I know, now it feels like I’m framing this as some kind of contest—as though some album called I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY! is competing against THE RISE AND FALL OF A MIDWEST PRINCESS. I haven’t mentioned Sabrina Carpenter or COWBOY CARTER once. But hey, when we’re debating sports we’re always adding our own caveats—conveniently leaving out the data that doesn’t fit our argument. Why shouldn’t I?
It feels genuinely difficult to project what happens next for Chappell Roan, and I suppose that’s part of the excitement. Musically, an over-the-top, glammed-out country song performed live for the first time on SNL was certainly one way to tease what happens next. It’s also hard to say what the powers that be will choose to do with Roan, whose public statements and persona are often a square peg for a round hole; no doubt someone at Island has asked her to tone down voicing her views on Palestine and the Democratic Party—whether or not she will is anyone’s guess. Certainly 2024 should’ve been a year filled with canned Condé Nast video content and panel appearances on late night TV shows; it should’ve been about the world getting to know who she is, giving personality to a pop star waiting in the wings—frankly, it should’ve been what Sabrina Carpenter has been doing for the last six months.
But it wasn’t. Whatever it was was far more thrilling than all of that.
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