Kathryn24601

If he loves long enough it will eventually happen.

It’s so sad, but no I don’t think the reviews have made any difference to the casual audience, and nor has the promo.

It won’t be released and it wouldn’t go to No 1 if it was. It wouldn’t get radio play - it is too old-fashioned a song. Olivia Dean’s fans want to hear her music, not Robbie’s. A collab would need to be a new song to actually work, and it would need to sound like Olivia’s song with a Robbie feature.

I am not really sure what they can do. Short of collaborating with a really hot young artist who has a large streaming audience he is not going to get the streaming numbers or new music played on commercial radio/radio 1. The would literally have to use underhanded bot tactics to get streaming numbers up - and what is the point of that when fake streaming chart placement does not affect anything in the real world? At this stage of his career he could write an ‘Angels’ and it just wouldn’t break through. His fanbase is predominantly middle aged now, don’t really listen to new music much, and don’t follow the charts. The avenues for impulse purchases of albums have all disappeared - the large casual audience who used to pick up a CD from the supermarket when they did the weekly shop because they liked that song they heard on the radio is long gone. And they don’t stream. The biopic and the Netflix doc both failed to significantly move the needle in terms of record sales, a decent amount of promo for Britpop did very little, and you are no longer allowed to make an album purchase compulsory for tour pre-sale periods. Robbie may just have to be content with making music on an UTR budget for the hard core fans who really want to hear it, and playing the Greatest Hits live to everyone else.

I was also at Brixton tonight! At the back in the seated section so no good pictures. I think the energy was a little less in the balcony - but I still had a fab time! I really hope he does more of these small gigs - I enjoy the big stadium shows but there is something so special about seeing how much he loved performing the new tracks.

Yes. But the point is that artists who cannot sell tickets cannot make money, and most artists who cannot make money can’t afford to continue to do music for their career. And if new artists can’t get to the point of a Katy Perry, and fill arenas even when they are no longer going viral on TikTok, what is going to happen to the music industry in 20 years’ time?

I was literally yesterday just reading this Substack piece about how virality on TikTok fails to translate to ticket sales. https://open.substack.com/pub/joelgouveia/p/1-million-monthly-listeners-12-tickets?r=6aemn&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay So yeah, a new artist might blow up on socials. But it doesn’t seem to do them much long-term good in itself. The established artists are still far more likely to be earning a decent living, because streaming pays peanuts. Without the investment of a major label for the long term those new artists still struggle.

It’s not my fault your reading comprehension is bad and you can’t pick up context clues. I think are wrong about the effect of streaming on new artists. Every metric I have seen shows that the biggest beneficiaries are established artists, and that new artists find it harder than ever to get noticed amongst the see of literal AI slop flooding the streaming services. New artists can’t make money from streaming and find that even when they make it onto a playlist and get a lot of streams their name recognition is still very low, which means they struggle to build an engaged fanbase to sell merch and tickets too. Merch and tickets is basically how artists make money now.

Right, so still less than Robbie in his heyday then. Would Robbie’s physicals have been as high if streaming had been a thing back then? No - although clearly his streams would also be much higher. But streaming and it’s knock-on effect has fundamentally damaged the music ecosystem. That is the point I am making.

I am talking about sales of new albums to compare like with like, because I can’t be arsed to go back and work out the maths of what Robbie’s albums sold in their subsequent years of release. I thought that was obvious from context but have edited to make it clearer. Feel free to do dig out the data for a comparison.

I think it is just the market at the moment unfortunately. If you compare its first week sales (not streams, pure sales, because we know Robbie fans tend not to stream) to the first week sales of the No1s from 2025, it would rank 8th on the list. For an artist in the 30th year of their career that is not bad at all. The only artists who did really huge numbers for their new releases in 2025 were Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Sabrina Carpenter and Sam Fender. And even Taylor Swift’s actual numbers for 2025 are no where near as big as Robbie’s in his prime. Her combined 2025 sales (streams, physical and downloads) were 642000. Rudebox was deemed a massive failure back in 2006 for ‘only’ selling that many copies. When Robbie was at the stage Taylor is now, he was selling 2+ million copies per album. I find it terribly sad, because it must mean that casual music fans are listening to a lot less new music and new artists than they used to. They are just not getting exposed to new music from artists they already like because it is not being served to them in an accessible format. The older audience does not stream because streaming is rubbish, but they are also not getting the chance to browse new releases while doing their supermarket shop, there’s very few record stores left, and there’s few opportunities in the telly for new music.

It’s very hard to be sure as accurate global sales figures are hard to come by. Chartmasters has Intensive Care at 6.5 million and Escapology at 7.9 million, but appear not to count a million albums sold in Mexico by being preloaded on to a device (either a phone or an mp3), and I think must either be missing or not counting some other ROW sales as well. They also have Greatest Hits at 8.7 million as his best selling. I know Stephen Duffy says that Intensive Care is his best selling album outside the U.K., though. In any case, it was more than successful enough to make ‘politely written off’ risible, even though it did not do as well in the U.K. as Escapology did.

There is a massive unspoken irony in the British Press selling the story (believed by many) that Robbie needed to re-join Take That because his career was flagging, when it was the exact opposite situation across Europe - Take That needed Robbie back to be able to sell albums and tour in Europe I know the official line is that Jay pushed for the reunion and that they had made up already so everything was hunky-dory, but the deeply cynical part of me thinks that it wouldn’t have happened if Take That were not going to get a European stadium tour out of it.

Yes, and was his most successful album in Latin America. I wonder if the article had been drafted by ChatGPT. The Neil Hannon thing has the flavour of an AI hallucination.

I messaged him on Instagram to point out that it was borderline defamation as well as obviously wrong and it looks like he has now quietly edited it. Without responding to thank me, obviously. 🙄