2014's Music News: Taylor Shakes Off Industry-Wide Sales Slump, U2 Gives It Away & Crashes
It has been said that 2014 was the year of the booty, but that’s only half right. Sure, J.Lo, Iggy Azalea, and Nicki Minaj nearly broke the Internet with booty-quaking videos. But 2014 wasn’t all about that bass, as Meghan Trainor sang in her 2014 hit. Taylor Swift, U2, Beyoncé and Jay Z, and others made headlines — and were sometimes the butt of music-industry jokes, so to speak.
Read on as we count down the biggest music news stories of 2014.
1. Taylor Swift Shakes Off Industry-Wide Sales Slump, Pulls Music From Spotify
Back in November, Taylor Swift was called out for her lack of back by Diplo in a tweet. But she certainly wasn’t lacking in sales. Just a few weeks after industry observers were bemoaning the fact that no single album had yet to sell more than a million copies in 2014, along came Swift to shake off that talk with the monster sales of 1989, her first “official” pop album. It managed to shift 1.287 million units in its first week, for the best sales week since The Eminem Show sold 1.322 million in 2002.
Diplo wasn’t the only one throwing shade at Swift. Spotify and its users weren’t too happy when she refused to allow 1989 on the streaming service, and then yanked the rest of her music from Spotify.
"If I had streamed the new album, it’s impossible to try to speculate what would have happened," Swift told Yahoo Music. “But all I can say is that music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment. And I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music. And I just don’t agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free.”
2. Streaming Continues to Make an Impact
Taylor Swift may never ever get back together with Spotify, but much of the industry was learning to embrace the new world order of the music business. With dwindling sales of CDs and downloads, subscription streaming services continued to look like a somewhat viable alternative. As evidence of this shift in how music is consumed, in early December Billboard began taking into account streaming data from Spotify, Beats Music, and Google Play, along with traditional sales, in compiling the Billboard 200 album chart. The news came in mid-November when year-to-date sales for 2014 were at 209.5 million, a 13 percent drop compared to the same period in 2013.
3. U2 Gives Away Songs and Gets Slammed, Bono Crashes
Despite Swift’s monster sales, there may have been one album that was heard by more people — but it wasn’t sold the traditional way. In September, as Apple was unveiling the iPhone 6, the company loaded U2’s Songs of Innocence into half a billion customers’ iTunes accounts. The tech crowd rebelled, outraged by the intrusion into their personal music library. Apple, which paid U2 $100 million for the privilege of giving the album away, responded by offering instructions to remove the offending album, and Bono offered an half-apology. “Oops. I’m sorry about that. I had this beautiful idea and we got carried away with ourselves,” he said. Apple later revealed that 81 million people “experienced” the album, with 26 million actually downloading it… so 55 million passed on free U2.
A few months later, just before U2 was about to kick off a weeklong residency on The Tonight Show, Bono crashed his bike in Central Park, effectively derailing the next phase of the band’s promotional campaign behind the embattled Songs of Innocence. In spite of all the controversy, or maybe because of it, Rolling Stone named it album of the year, setting off yet another wave of Bono-bashing.
4. Dave Grohl Is Everywhere
Bono wasn’t the only high-profile rocker to feel a bit of a backlash. The first part of the year went well enough for former Nirvana drummer and head Foo Fighter Dave Grohl. In April, Nirvana was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He, bassist Kris Novoselic, and touring guitarist Pat Smear put Nirvana back together for the occasion and called on Joan Jett, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, St. Vincent, and Lorde to take turns singing lead. Grohl even settled his long-running beef with Courtney Love with a hug at the podium, and the performance was well received.
In October, Grohl and Foo Fighters revealed their rockumentary series Sonic Highways on HBO, and later their companion-piece album of the same name. Some admired Grohl’s ambition, with Paul Stanley of KISS calling him “the Ken Burns of rock documentaries,” but others slammed the Foos for attempting to raise their profile by standing on the shoulders of giants. Although some critics didn’t approve, the fans ate it up: Sonic Highways was named album of the year in Rolling Stone's Readers' Poll.
5. Beyoncé and Jay Z Are Still Drunk in Love
Although her surprise December 2013 release came out too late for Grammy consideration (it is up for next year’s Grammys), Beyoncé still made her presence felt on the music industry’s biggest night, opening the January 2014 show with a sizzling set that included her tux-sporting husband Jay Z on “Drunk in Love.”
Bey and Jay remained in the news for much of the year, with rumors flying hot and heavy that their marriage was on the rocks, particularly after footage leaked in May from an elevator surveillance camera at a New York hotel that showed Beyoncé’s sister, Solange Knowles, attacking Jay as Bey looked on. The rumors continued over the summer as the couple soldiered on with their On the Run stadium tour. Finally, in late August, Jay put the rumors to rest by appearing onstage with their daughter Blue Ivy to present his better half with the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award at the MTV Video Music Awards. He wiped away tears, and she called him her “beloved.” Case closed for now.
6. Boy Bands Continue to Do Boffo Business
In 2014, Britain’s One Direction was bigger than ever in the U.S. With the album Four, 1D became the first band ever to top the Billboard 200 with its first four albums. On top of that, the group’s Where We Are tour racked in $290 million and was the top tour of the year. On the strength the album sales and the tour, One Direction was named the top artist of 2014 by Billboard magazine.
Meanwhile, 2014 saw the rise of 5 Seconds of Summer, Rixton, Emblem3, and Big Time Rush, along with a fresh new wave of nostalgia for ’90s boy bands New Kids on the Block, Backstreet Boys, Take That, and 98 Degrees. There are likely many people waiting for the latest boy band craze to die out, but sorry, that didn’t happen in 2014.
7. The Trouble with the Biebs Continues
While Bono and Dave Grohl may have had their ups and downs in 2014, for onetime prince of pop Justin Bieber, the year was mostly trouble. Sure, he topped Forbes's Highest-Earning Celebrities Under 30 list with an estimated $80 million over 12 months, but he also created a bunch of headaches for his handlers, his neighbors, and law enforcement. He began the year with an arrest in Florida for drag-racing a yellow Lamborghini while reeking of alcohol. He got off with a fine and a slap on the wrist, but he managed to get himself in more trouble, including a misdemeanor and two years of probation for throwing eggs at a neighbor's home in Calabasas, California; another arrest for reckless driving and an alleged assault with a paparazzo near his hometown of Stafford, Ontario; and in November, he was ordered to appear in Argentina over an alleged assault of a photographer in that country. In between all that, there was plenty of drama over his on-again, off-again relationship with singer/actress Selena Gomez.
8. Daft Punk, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, and Lorde Win Big at the Grammys
One place where Bieber wasn’t well represented was at the 56th Annual Grammy Awards, held back in January. He didn’t win a single award —because he wasn’t nominated. He didn’t perform, either. Those who did win big and put on notable performances included French electronic duo Daft Punk, who took home five awards, including Album of the Year for Random Access Memories and Record of the Year for the omnipresent “Get Lucky”; Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, who were named Best New Artist and got three wins in rap categories; and Lorde, who won Song of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance with “Royals.”
The Beatles were honored with a belated Lifetime Achievement Award in a ceremony the previous night, but Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr were on hand to perform — Ringo doing his “Photograph” and later joining McCartney on drums for Paul’s new song “Queenie Eye.” McCartney also won Best Rock Song along with that ever-present Grohl guy and the rest of the Nirvana survivors for their Sound City collabo “Cut Me Some Slack.”
One of the night’s big losers may have been the show’s producers for cutting short the rocking finale featuring Grohl, Nine Inch Nails, Queens of the Stone Age, and Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsay Buckingham. NIN’s Reznor was unwilling to cut them any slack, tweeting a “heartfelt” eff you to the show’s producers.
9. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis Celebrate “Same Love,” Country Stars Come Out
Another Grammy highlight was Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s performance of gay equality anthem “Same Love,” as 33 couples — some gay, some straight — were wed onstage during the duo’s performance with lesbian singer Mary Lambert.
That new openness to same-sex relationships was also apparent when Neon Trees’ frontman Tyler Glenn came out in March no one seemed to think it wasn’t a big deal. It was much bigger news when country singers Ty Herndon and Billy Gilman came out on the same day months later, in November, challenging the traditionally conservative country crowd to accept them.
10. Coachella Goes Dancing
On the festival front, California’s Coachella Festival continued to rule the roost, but there appeared to be changes affront. High-profile performances by the reunited Replacements, beloved hip-hop duo Outkast, and even British mod-prog rockers Muse were greeted with lukewarm responses, while EDM artists like Skrillex drew overflowing crowds to the dance-centric Sahara tent — perhaps pointing to where we’re heading in 2015. But then again, maybe not.
