Morgan Wallen Has 2021’s Most Popular Album Across All Genres On Billboard Charts: Report

Bruce Haring
·3 min read
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He was banned, ostracized, and confronted on national television. But Morgan Wallen overcame those obstacles to score last year’s most popular album across all genres on the Billboard charts, according to research from MRC Data in cooperation with Billboard.

The year-end report covers music consumption for the 12-month period from Jan. 1, 2021 through December 30, 2021. During that period, Wallen’s Dangerous: The Double Album was 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.

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The 30-track album marked Wallen’s first No. 1 on the all-genre weekly Billboard 200 chart in January 2021, and spent 10 weeks atop the tally — the most weeks at No. 1 for a country album since Taylor Swift’s Fearless spent 11 weeks at No. 1 in 2008-2009.

Wallen achieved his milestones despite the backlash when he was caught on tape making a racial slur toward a friend in February 2021. He was immediately put on hiatus from his record company, and many radio and streaming outlets, as well as award shows, banned him.

He has since been making amends, expressing remorse in interviews and doing sporadic concert walk-ons. This coming year will see him mount a long tour that is scheduled to start in February.

Other tidbits from the full report, which can be downloaded here:

  • Adele’s 30 arrived on Nov. 19 and saw the highest album sales debut in four years, with first-week sales of 839,000 equivalent units during the week ending Nov. 25. That figure includes album sales of 692,000 copies, making it the biggest-selling album debut since Taylor Swift’s Reputation in 2017. Its first single, “Easy on Me,” set radio records by entering the Oct. 30-dated Radio Songs chart at No. 4, marking the highest debut since the tally became an all-format ranking in December 1998.

  • Audio on-demand streaming reached a new single-year high of 988.1 billion streams in 2021, which included a notable decline in yearly audio streams of Current music (which decreased 19.4%). For the first time since MRC Data began measuring streaming data, music fans spent more time with Catalog (which was up 29.4% this year).

  • Physical music sales also saw a notable changing of the guard in 2021, with vinyl surpassing CDs as the most-sold physical format for the first time since MRC Data started measuring music sales in 1991.

  • World Music saw a 17.4% rise* in total consumption year-over-year in 2021, fueled by another record year of K-Pop milestones on the charts. This included Hot 100 hits for South Korea’s BTS as well as solo hits from two members of girl group BLACKPINK and a breakthrough hit for Twice.

  • Audio on-demand streaming reached a new single-year high of 988.1 billion streams in 2021, which included a notable decline in yearly audio streams of Current music (which decreased 19.4%). For the first time since MRC Data began measuring streaming data, music fans spent more time with Catalog (which was up 29.4% this year).

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