The Year in Music News: Adele Gave the Industry Hope, Terrorists Attacked Rock 'n' Roll
Eagles of Death Metal (photo: Getty Images)
2015 was a year of new highs and horrific new lows. The year’s two biggest music stories occurred in the final two months – one was a commercial and artistic triumph, the other a tragedy worse than any the popular music world has ever experienced.
The good news: Adele’s return with her third album, 25, gave the music industry hope by shattering sales records at a time when blockbuster albums were thought to be a thing of the past.
[Related: The Top-Selling Songs and Albums of 2015]
The bad news: For the first time in history, a rock ‘n’ roll show was the target of a terrorist attack, as 89 innocent fans were killed on Nov. 13 at an Eagles of Death Metal show in Paris. As Bono noted a day after the attack, “This is the first direct hit on music that we’ve had in this so-called War on Terror or whatever it’s called. It’s very upsetting. These are our people. This could be me at a show. You at a show, in that venue.”
While the world was still reeling from the horrific events in Paris, an old friend helped soothe our souls. Ending a four-year wait, Adele returned with 25 a week after the attacks. With an advanced buzz created by the first single, “Hello,” 25 sold 3.38 million copies in its first week, the largest tally since SoundScan began tracking sales data in 1991. In its fourth day of release, it surpassed the previous record-holder – 'NSYNC's No Strings Attached, which debuted with 2.4 million copies in its opening week – and it has also proven to have legs. In its second week, it sold another 1.11 million copies. To date, the album has sold more than 5 million copies, a feat Adele also accomplished with her previous album, 21.
Just prior to the release of 25, the faceoff between pop titans Justin Bieber and One Direction received a bunch of advanced hype, but it turned out to be anticlimactic. The Biebs beat One Direction – now reduced to a foursome following the defection of Zayn Malik earlier in the year – with his Purpose outselling their Made in the A.M. 649,000 to 460,000. Still, neither – nor both combined – was a match Adele the following week.
[Related: The Biggest Musical Comebacks of 2015]
STREAMING WARS
Adele’s success came at a time when much of the music industry had begun to embrace streaming as a viable option to physical sales or downloads. Spotify continued to build upon its base of users, with its base of 55 million users and 20 million paid subscribers. A rival paid service, Apple Music, was launched to mixed reviews in late June. It attracted about 15 million users, but only 6.5 million of them stuck with it after the free three-month trial period ended. Apple honcho Jimmy Iovine’s sexist remarks about female Apple Music users probably didn’t help matters.
Meanwhile, Jay Z jumped into the game in late March by taking over Tidal, which he rebranded “an artist-owned” option to the others, but his all-star launch – which featured an all-star list of hit-makers including Alicia Keys, Beyoncé, Jack White, Daft Punk, Madonna, Kanye West, Madonna, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, and others – turned off some, who thought it was absurd that millionaire artists were complaining they weren’t getting paid by the other streaming services.
However, some artists did take a stand against streaming. Although “Hello” was omnipresent on streaming services and YouTube, Adele withheld the full 25 album, which likely would still have set sales records had she allowed it to be streamed. Taylor Swift took on Spotify by pulling her music off the service in late 2014 and then went head-to-head with Apple Music just before its launch. Apple relented and agreed to pay artists for songs streamed during its three-month-free trial period for users. And, as the year was winding down, Spotify was considering ditching its “freemium” model for only paid subscriptions as a way convince holdouts like Swift and Adele to join their streaming party.
Speaking of Swift, she also had a huge album with 1989, which was released in October 2014, but continued to sell boatloads into 2015, with sales exceeding 5.5 million by December. Swift also filled arenas around the globe with a bevy of guest stars joining her onstage at various tour stops. The album also inspired a song-for-song tribute by Ryan Adams in September, which in turn inspired a Velvet Underground-style tribute/pisstake by Father John Misty, before he opted to pull it down from the Web.
This week, longtime holdouts the Beatles finally made their catalog available on streaming services starting on Dec. 24, giving Fab Four fans a fab Christmas gift indeed.
ON THE ROAD
Swift wasn’t the only female artist to stage a blockbuster tour in 2015. Her frenemy Katy Perry had even more success with her Prismatic World Tour, helping her top Forbes’s music industry earners list.
Of course, the veteran acts also raked it in on tour in 2015, with the Rolling Stones returning to the road with their Zip Code stadium tour in support of the re-release of the classic 1971 album Sticky Fingers. Dave Grohl broke his leg falling off the stage in a June gig in Sweden, but he didn’t let him get him down. Instead, he had a customized throne built and the Foo Fighters just kept rocking. U2 did their best to redeem themselves after the poorly received free-download stunt with Songs of Innocence in 2014 with their Experience + Innocence Tour, while the surviving members of the Grateful Dead said Fare Thee Well with a series of stadium shows in Santa Clara, California, and Chicago, and then came back with additional dates with John Mayer.
The Dead weren’t the only veteran act who collaborated with more contemporary artist. Paul McCartney, who also continued to do well on the road, worked with Kanye West and Rihanna on the track “FourFiveSeconds,” which became a top five hit. And Madonna literally turned up on top of Drake during the first weekend of Coachella, giving him a big wet kiss that left the hip-hop star wiping his mouth and trying to shake the whole thing off. (This followed the humiliation of Madonna falling offstage at this year’s BRIT Awards.) Drake was able to rebound and deliver “Hotline Bling” in the summer, one of the year’s catchiest and most successful tracks and videos.
AT THE MOVIES
Music was also big at the multiplex, with the N.W.A biopic Straight Outta Compton becoming one of the summer’s surprise hits. It went on to become the highest-grossing music biopic of all time in the U.S., just a few weeks after its release with grosses of $120.9 million, passing up the previous record holder, 2005’s Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line.
The film also stoked the creative juices of N.W.A musical mastermind Dr. Dre, who ended his more than 15-year drought of original music with the release of Compton: A Soundtrack by Dr. Dre, which was inspired by the film. Although the album was released exclusively through Apple Music and iTunes, it still debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200.
[Related: The Pop Chart’s Winners & Losers of 2015]
2015 brought much more music to the box office, including the Amy Winehouse documentary Amy, the Brian Wilson biopic Love and Mercy, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, Pitch Perfect 2, and Colin Hanks’s Tower Records documentary All Things Must Pass.
BREAKOUT ARTISTS
One of the artists featured on Dre’s comeback was Kendrick Lamar, a Compton-based rapper who has continued N.W.A’s tradition by delivering hard-hitting, socially conscious rap. Lamar already had gained a following with his first two albums, and earned a pair of Grammy Awards, but 2015 was truly his breakthrough year with his third album, To Pimp a Butterfly, and “Bad Blood,” his chart-topping collab with Taylor Swift. When the nominations were announced for the 58th Annual Grammy Awards in December, Lamar led the way with 11 nominations, including Album of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Rap Album.
Another artist with a multiple Grammy nominations (seven) and a major breakthrough in 2015 was the Weeknd. Like Lamar, the Canadian R&B crooner had two previous efforts and a growing fanbase, but 2015 marked his major breakthrough as the album, Beauty Behind the Madness, and singles “Can’t Feel My Face” and “The Hills” all topped the Billboard charts.
Another noteworthy chart-topper in 2015 was New Jersey rapper Fetty Wap. Although he only got two Grammy nominations, he ruled the singles chart for much of the year. His breakthrough single, “Trap Queen,” which released in late 2014, but eventually reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in May, followed by two other top-10 entries, “679” and “My Way.”
On the country front, Chris Stapleton, previously known as a songwriter with six No. 1 country hits, released Traveller, his debut solo album, to critical acclaim. At the CMA Awards, he was a surprise winner of three major categories – Best Male Vocalist, New Artist of the Year, and Album of the Year for Traveller, and he put in a killer performance of the George Jones hit “Tennessee Whiskey” with Justin Timberlake. The next week, Traveller shot up to No. 1 on the Billboard chart. The following month, he received four Grammy nominations, including an Album of the Year nod for Traveller.
SPLITS AND ROMANCES
There were also romantic couplings and splits. Taylor Swift made big news when she went public in March with her new relationship with superstar DJ Calvin Harris at a Kenny Chesney show. Gwen Stefani split from her husband, Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale, only to reveal a few weeks later that she was already in a new relationship with Voice co-star Blake Shelton (who’d just shockingly split from his wife, Miranda Lambert).
Lenny Kravitz didn’t end a high-profile relationship in 2015, but he did suffer a newsworthy split when his leather pants busted at the seams back while he was performing in August at a gig in Stockholm, exposing his junk for all the world (wide web) to see.
IN COURT
On the legal front, Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams lost a landmark copyright case to Marvin Gaye’s family, with a judge ruling the duo ripped off Gaye’s classic “Got to Give It Up” with Thicke’s 2013 mega-hit “Blurred Lines.” They were ordered to pay the Gaye family $7.4 million, which was later reduced to $5.3 million, but in December they filed an appeal. Stay tuned.
Hoping to avoid such legal headaches, British crooner Sam Smith gave Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne co-writing credit on his Grammy-nominated single “Stay With Me,” because its chorus was similar to Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.” Similarly, Mark Ronson added five writers to the credits of “Uptown Funk,” his monster hit with Bruno Mars, after the writers of the Gap Band’s 1979 hit “Oops Upside Your Head” threatened legal action.
In other legal news, Kesha won the first round of her lawsuit against producer Dr. Luke, when a judge ruled in March that her claim of being raped was more substantial than Luke’s claim that he was defamed by her lawsuit.
SEXUAL ASSAULT REVELATIONS
While they didn’t involve lawsuits, several high-profile claims about old sexual assaults made big news in 2015. In July, former Runaways bassist Jacqueline Fuchs (aka Jackie Fox) claimed that she was raped in 1975 by the band’s now late manager Kim Fowley, while – she alleged – her fellow bandmates Cherie Currie and Joan Jett looked on. Jett and Currie denied it. Fuchs’s claim spurred plenty of discussion about predatory managers and music executives taking advantage of young talent.
Also causing a stir was Chrissie Hynde’s revelation that as a young woman she had been forced to perform sex acts on members of a biker gang. Shockingly, she blamed herself and other rape victims for the abuse. “If you don’t want to entice a rapist, don’t wear high heels so you can’t run from him,” she said in an interview with the U.K.’s Sunday Times Magazine.
Madonna also revealed that she was sexually assaulted when she was 19, in an interview with Howard Stern to promote her latest album, Rebel Heart. She told Stern she found it “too humiliating” to press charges and to have to go through an interview, physical examination and then a trial.
Last year, Lady Gaga revealed to Stern that she, too, had been sexually assaulted at the age of 19. This year, her collaboration with Diane Warren “’Til It Happens to You,” a song about surviving rape, was featured in the college campus documentary on the subject, The Hunting Ground.
FAREWELLS
In 2015, we also said goodbye to some legends who passed. Among them Allen Toussaint, the legendary New Orleans pianist, singer arranger, producer, and songwriter, who died of a heart attack at 77; “Stand By Me” singer Ben E. King, who died at 76 of heart disease; B.B. King, the “King of the Blues,” who passed due to diabetes at 89; Yes bassist Chris Squire, who died from leukemia at 67, former Stone Temple Pilots/Velvet Revolver singer Scott Weiland, who died of cardiac arrest at 48; and the 89 fans and associates of Eagles of Death Metal.
While nothing will bring those victims of the Paris attacks back, U2 helped fans around the world feel a bit better as they closed their tour with two shows rescheduled after the Paris massacre. On Dec. 7, the final night of their tour – broadcast on HBO – Bono and the boys brought out Eagles of Death Metal for a triumphant cover of Patti Smith’s “People Have the Power” (she performed the song with U2 the previous night) in what was perhaps the greatest rock ‘n’ roll moment of 2015.
“These are our brothers, our fellow troubadours. They were robbed of their stage three weeks ago, and we would like to offer them ours tonight,” Bono said prior to the joint performance. Then U2 generously handed over the stage to Eagles of Death Metal. Before the band launched into their song, “I Love You All the Time,” singer Jesse Hughes said, “I look around and I see – how do I say it? – nos amis, our friends. I love you guys so [effing] hard,” he added. “And I will never stop rocking and rolling.”
Check out the rest of our Year in Music content here.
