Morgan Wallen music sales, streams rise after artist filmed using racial slurs

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Morgan Wallen faced a week of repercussions after a video released on Tuesday showed the singer using a racial slur, but the artist is seeing an increase in album sales and streams.

The video was released on February 2 at around 9 p.m. ET. In the following days, Wallen’s album feeds and sales increased despite major radio players, IHeartMedia and Entercom, announcing that his music would be taken off the rotation, according to data from Billboard and Rolling Stone.

Data from Billboard and Rolling Stone compares radio broadcast numbers to Wallen’s sales and music stream numbers between Tuesday (when the video first aired that night) and the following days.

Its radio broadcast in American genres went from 2,100 plays on Tuesday to 617 plays on Wednesday; a drop of about 71%, according to Billboard data.

But Wallen’s album sales and streams have seen an increase despite radio declines, according to Billboard.

Its total catalog of albums and songs sold 22,500 combined copies in the United States on Wednesday, while a day earlier its total copies sold stood at 5,000 copies.

Rolling Stone reports numbers that point to the same peaks reported by Billboard.

There was a 79% drop in radio broadcasts between Wednesday and Thursday after the video was released, according to Rolling Stone thanks to their analysis of data provided by Alpha Data.

The same data indicates that the artist’s sales increased 1,220% between Tuesday and Wednesday.

Its position on Spotify’s top streaming charts has also seen an increase since the incident. Wallen is absent from Spotify’s premiere country playlist, but his songs rank among the app’s top US streaming charts. On Tuesday, her popular song “Wasted On You” was ranked No. 14 in the Top 200, but Thursday, two days after the video’s release, “Wasted On You” rose to No. 9.

Other artists have experienced spikes in flow after facing a scandal. In 2019, R. Kelly’s music experienced a similar peak.

Within three days of the premiere of “Surviving R. Kelly,” a documentary that delved into allegations of sexual and physical abuse against the artist, daily sales of Kelly’s songs and albums more than doubled compared to daily sales for the previous two weeks, according to data compiled by Nielsen, a data analysis company better known for TV ratings. Audio-on-demand streams for the same period saw an increase of 76% and video streams increased by 85%.

In the video, Wallen told a friend to “take care of this … (insult)”, apparently referring to another person in the group as he was dropped off at a house. Wallen said he was “embarrassed and sorry”.

“I used an unacceptable and inappropriate racial slur that I wish I could take back,” Wallen said in a statement. “There is no excuse for using this type of language, ever. I would like to sincerely apologize for using that word. I promise to do better. “

He has since been suspended from his label, cut from his agency, William Morris Endeavor, and deemed ineligible for the Academy of Country Music Awards.

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