Lizzo’s 2022 album Special was a bonafide hit, selling more than 39,000 copies in its first week and with 69,000 album equivalent units from streams and downloads.
It was enough to get her the number two spot on the Billboard 200, while also being met with positive reviews from critics and multiple Grammy nominations (Lizzo won Record of the Year for the single “About Damn Time”).
Four years later, it’s a very different story. Rolling Stone has reported that Lizzo sold just 2,649 copies of her new album, Bitch, and achieved just 2.7 million on-demand streams, according to music data company Luminate. In its second week, sales dropped to 650 units.
Bitch, which was released on Atlantic Records on 5 June, also failed to chart at all on the Billboard 200; not one of the album’s singles have become chart hits.
Lizzo herself spoke out against perceived changes in the music industry, blaming these for limiting her audience.
“The industry changed so much in the last three years,” she wrote on X. “Streaming replaced radio and I was a radio darling. That’s how my fans discovered my music.”
However, music executive and pundit Ray Daniels, who hosts The Raydar Report, told Rolling Stone that it was “BS” to place the blame on streaming.
“If you know that the industry is changing, you should be warning your fans ahead of time,” he said. “Why are you not telling your fans to request your song on radio? They’re your fans, they’ll do what you ask them to do.”
Lizzo also acknowledged what she called the “very obvious and public attack on my career” that shifted the public’s perception of her.
In 2023, Lizzo was sued by three of her former backup dancers, who accused her of sexual misconduct and body-shaming in what they alleged was a “hostile” work environment.
Their accusations were backed by the singer’s former creative director, another dancer, and filmmaker Sophia Nahli Allison, who claimed she quit a documentary project after witnessing Lizzo exhibit “unkind and cruel” behaviour.
Lizzo vehemently denied all the claims against her, some of which have been dismissed by a judge, and said in May that she would continue fighting her case. “I’m not afraid of the truth,” she told Gayle King on CBS Mornings, stating she would rather prepare for trial than opt for an easy settlement. “The truth is less salacious than the headlines,” she said.
The poor sales of Bitch might be tied in with Lizzo’s public image, or indeed the lack of radio play, but it could also be that listeners are simply not connecting with her new music as they did to hits such as “Good as Hell”, “Truth Hurts” or “Juice”.
In a two-star review, The Independent said the album was “strangely muted and full of cliched platitudes that suggest she can’t even convince herself that she’s OK, let alone the rest of us”.
“Bitch feels like an attempt to resurrect her image from before the controversy, one of an unbothered, unapologetic and confident queen,” the review said. “Yet in every respect, this record is all over the place.”
Other critics had similar opinions, with The Guardian, Financial Times and Rolling Stone also giving it either two or two-and-a-half stars and bemoaning its “disjointed” tone, comparing it unfavourably to Special.
