Will Zayn Be Dropped From RCA? First Week Sales For "Icarus Falls" Look DISMAL!
Ring the alarm because Zayn's career is in an emergency.
The ever-reliable people at Hits Daily Double informed yesterday of their sales expectations for the albums released in America last Friday, December 14. One of those albums is Zayn's second solo project "Icarus Falls", which after many delays was finally released last week via RCA Records/Sony Music. And you know how much this album is expected to sell in it's first week? More than Taylor Swift's "Reputation"? Not quite... "Icarus Falls" is expected to shift 3k-5k in pure sales and 15k-20k in total activity (digital sale plus streaming added). And yes, that's DISMAL. For reference, Tinashe's "Joyride" album moved around 10k in total units. And you know how critical Tinashe's career is at this point, right? There are rumors RCA is going to give her the chop any day.
These are bad and quite frankly, unexpected numbers for Zayn. Executives at RCA must be in disbelief. I honestly thought having the One Direction fanbase would guarantee strong sales for Zayn for the rest of his career but I was wrong... or something has happened. Are One Direction fans not Team Zayn anymore? Well, considering how much Zayn has bashed his former 1D buddies in the last years and in his new songs, I guess the decrease in support from the 1D fanbase isn't that surprising.
Another blaming factor for these traffic first-week numbers is Zayn's refusal to do any kind of promotion for "Icarus Falls". I know he has anxiety issues but not everything has to be performances... you can also give interviews and make appearances. But Zayn has done nada. And this all clearly affected the very important first-week sales. Zayn probably thought he would compensate the sales damage from the lack of promo by including 27 tracks on "Icarus Falls" and be convinced the higher possibilities of more streams would give him more "album sales" in the end and that all would be good. But his strategy has backfired.
I wonder how upset Zayn really is, though. He clearly isn't happy at RCA Records and this massive album flop could be his excuse to abandon the Sony label. I don't know how many albums he has left in his contract but given this embarrassing flop and their tense relationship, I wouldn't be surprised if RCA opts to end Zayn's contract before the official expiring date.
Have you bought/heard all of "Icarus Falls"? Do you consider it a good album or does it deserve this flop?
According to Hits Daily Double numbers, Zayn's second album would debut within the Top 50 of the Billboard Top 200 chart... yey?
The numbers aren't official, of course, these are just estimations but HDD estimations are always on point. If you are a true Zayn fan, I would start streaming all the songs on "Icarus Falls" like crazy right now. First-week sales for this album closes this coming Friday at midnight. Official numbers will be revealed on the weekend.
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