Wallen album most popular of 2021
New data from the music industry confirms what a lot of people long suspected — 2021 was a very good year for Morgan Wallen, Adele and vinyl.
MRC Data’s year-end report, presented in collaboration with Billboard, showed that Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” ended 2021 as both the top country album of the year and the most popular album across all genres, with 3.2 million equivalent album units earned during the year. That’s despite Wallen being rebuked by the music industry after a video surfaced showing him using a racial slur.
Other top albums in 2021 include Olivia Rodrigo’s “SOUR,” Pop Smoke’s “Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon” and Doja Cat’s “Planet Her.” Dua Lipa’s single “Levitating” was unstoppable, with 804.7 million on-demand audio and video streams, the top hit of the year.
Adele’s album “30” arrived late last year, and she recorded the highest album sales debut in four years, with first-week sales of 839,000 equivalent units. It was the biggest selling album debut since Taylor Swift’s “Reputation” in 2017.
Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy” was 2021’s most popular rap album in the United States, with 1.97 million equivalent album units earned. Masked Wolf ’s “Astronaut in the Ocean” was the most consumed rap song of 2021. Bad Bunny’s “El Ultimo Tour Del Mundo” was the top Latin album.
Audio on-demand streaming set a singleyear high with 988.1 billion streams. And vinyl surpassed CDs as the most sold physical format for the first time since MRC Data started measuring music sales in 1991.
Vinyl’s share of physical sales accounted for less than 2% in 2011, but finished 2021 with more than half of all physical album sales, totaling 41.7 million albums.
Morrison short story to be published: To much of the world, the late Toni Morrison was a novelist, celebrated for such classics as “Beloved,” “Song of Solomon” and “The Bluest Eye.”
But the Nobel laureate also completed plays, poems, essays and short stories, one of which is coming out as a book on Feb. 1. “Recitatif,” written by Morrison in the early 1980s and rarely seen over the following decades, follows the lives of two women from childhood to their contrasting fortunes as adults. Zadie Smith contributes an introduction and the story’s audio edition is read by actor Bahni Turpin.
“Recitatif ” was included in the 1983 release “Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women,” now out of print. “Recitatif ” refers to a musical expression defined by Merriam-Webster as “a rhythmically free vocal style that imitates the natural inflections of speech,” a style Morrison’s often suggested. The story tells of a series of encounters between Roberta and Twyla, one of whom is Black, the other white, although readers are left to guess which is which.
Jan. 10 birthdays: Singer Ronnie Hawkins is 87. Actor William Sanderson is 78. Singer Rod Stewart is
77. Musician Donald Fagen is 74. Singer Pat Benatar is
69. Singer Shawn Colvin is 66. Actor Evan Handler is 61. Singer Brad Roberts is 58. Actor Trini Alvarado is 55. Singer Brent Smith is 44. Rapper Chris Smith is 43.