Girls still rule

I didn’t watch the Country Music Awards last night. … I’ve never watched the Country Music Awards.

But the CMAs' attempt to pop it up -- and the ladies' continued music dominance --  was all over social media this morning.

Meghan Trainor performed a country-fied “All About That Bass” with Miranda Lambert. But the clip I watched of it just made me cringe. So I'm not posting it here. … It’s ok. I still like Meghan a lot. Read this.

Ariana Grande also showed up to perform “Bang Bang” with Little Big Town. And it was fantastic. … Not to mention visually stunning.



As usual, Entertainment Weekly has the full run down of bests and worsts of the night.


So does Rolling Stone.


The women are still ruling the top of the charts, and Taylor Swift – who was nowhere to be found at the CMAs last night now that she’s a poppy New York girl – isn’t budging.

The girl is on fire. Consider …

One of only 19 albums, ever, to sell a million in a week: The club of artists able to shift a million albums in seven days is a truly exclusive one. Swift is not new to that list; in fact, she was the last artist to sell a million in a week, when 2012’s transitional country-to-pop crossover album Red moved 1.208 million in its debut.

The first artist to score a trio of platinum-weekers: Selling a million albums in a week is an extraordinary feat. Doing it twice is elite; Backstreet Boys, ’N Sync, and Eminem each scored two. Three times is madness, and only Swift has done it: Her last two albums—2010’s Speak Now (1.047 million) and the aforementioned Red—debuted to seven figures. Now, with 1989, Taylor scores an improbable trifecta—and by the way, her opening sales actually increased slightly on each of the three albums.

Instantly the year’s second-best seller, and the top seller by a single artist: All year, from January through October, only one album had sold more than a million copies cumulatively—the unkillable Frozen soundtrack (3.2 million sold in calendar 2014). The next two top-selling albums, Beyoncé and Lorde’s Pure Heroine, have sold just under 800,000 apiece in 2014. (Each sold additional copies in 2013.) With over a million sold in just its first week, Swift’s 1989 toppled both those ladies’ albums (by roughly half a million!) and now ranks second for the year, behind only the various-artists Disney soundtrack.

Only 2014 release to sell a million—not just in a week, TOTAL: Here’s the thing about Frozen, Beyoncé, and Pure Heroine—they’re all 2013 releases still selling well in 2014. Among albums dropped since January, the best-seller to date is Coldplay’s spring release Ghost Stories, which has sold 740K. And that number is cumulative—Coldplay sold that much in 23 weeks. Put another way: Taylor’s album is platinum-level out of the box; no other disc released in 2014 has even crawled to platinum.