The Resilience of ‘Now’
Playlists are a dime a dozen, but ‘Now That’s What I Call Music!’ compilation albums remain popular
Playlists are a dime a dozen, but Now That’s What I Call Music! albums remain popular.
If damian gandia had to rank his three favorite installments of the Now That’s What I Call Music! series, it’d go: Now 10, Now 64, Now 57.
Probably.
With Now 10, it’s mainly a nostalgia thing. Even though the 14-yearold from New Jersey hadn’t been born when it was released in 2002, the 10th edition of the long-running pop-hits compilation — which starts with Britney Spears’ “Overprotected” and ends with Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” — still brings back memories of music he heard as a kid. As for Now 64,
which features Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” and Billie Eilish’s “Ocean Eyes,” Gandia credits the “top-notch” sequencing: “I don’t even think there’s a single problem with Now 64,” he says.
Now That’s What I Call Music! began in the U.K. in 1983; 15 years later it came to the U.S., where it regularly topped the charts. Decades after that, even as album sales have cratered, Now has held on to a passionate fan base. Both Now 77, the most recent installment, and last year’s Now 73
debuted on the Rolling Stone Top 200 Albums chart, at Numbers 159 and 104, respectively. And if the RS 200 were based purely on physical sales, Now albums would regularly debut near the top of the charts, moving as many as 10,000 units a week even in lean years.
Fans like Gandia, who posts his reviews of each new Now compilation to YouTube under the name Trevortni Desserped, provide an eager and earnest answer to the question “Who listens to Now in 2021?” He says that even with endless playlists available on streaming services, Now offers something unique. “As dumb as it sounds, it’s kind of changed my life,” he says. “It provided me with a different format for listening to music. It’s a phenomenon that deserves to be recognized.”
The smoothly sequenced track lists that Gandia admires so much are something that Jeff Moskow, Now’s head of A&R and curation, spends a lot of time laboring over. Moskow, who’s been with Now since 2000, DJ’d at clubs when he was younger, and he tries to bring that same feeling of taking people on a musical journey to the series — which is all the more challenging when you’re trying to blend country, hip-hop, and pop hits into one set.
In particular, he pays a lot of attention to the space between tracks. He will debate with his engineer over a mere quarter of a second, recalling one time when he was trying to create a “literally seamless blending effect from track to track.”
“We went back and forth for three days,” Moskow says.
Taylor Swift Doubles Up
After a massive 2020 that included two surprise albums, Taylor Swift kept the momentum going into 2021 with a slew of chart milestones. She topped the Artists 500 chart for a ninth time (a feat outdone only by Drake), smashed the record for most simultaneous albums on the RS 200 (with eight at once), and extended her record for most Top 10 songs on the RS 100 (15 to date). Now, Swift takes two of the Top 10 albums of 2021 so far: Evermore pulled in 272 million streams through February, while Folklore saw 171 million. We’ll know soon whether her rerecording of 2008’s Fearless nets her any new achievements.