To remind us all of the disturbing (but also disturbing) truth that white people rarely fail because they have done or said racist things in America, Billboard reports today that while country music artist Morgan Wallen’s radio broadcast has dropped significantly recently TMZ posted a video of him shouting a racial expression recorded by his neighbors, the sales of his music apparently more than tripled.
And while we would wholeheartedly push back on the old adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity – and would specifically categorize that “being rightly chastised by most right-thinking people for calling out racial remarks” there is a good example is, it seems that there is still no such thing as ‘ineffective’ publicity. Wallen’s music was quickly kicked off from iHeart stations and other radio venues shortly after the video was released on February 3, and his label, Big Loud Records, announced that he was ‘suspended indefinitely’. But Billboard reports that sales of all of Wallen’s songs jumped from 5,000 to 2,000 after the release of the 5,000-video, indicating that the incident did little more than raise its profile among certain sections of the country’s audience. to increase.
Read more
Wallen apologized shortly after the video began circulating, raising a question about how long this ‘indefinite’ suspension from the country music institution is likely to last. On the one hand, both the Academy of Country Music and the Country Music Association condemned Wallen for his comments. On the other hand, well … music industry executives tend to do that really like sales, you know? It’s like their whole thing.