Kygo released his Stargazing EP last week and according to Chart Data and the Nielsen Report only 37 copies were sold in the US. Not 37K, Not 3,700, just THIRTY-SEVEN copies were sold in the first week of the EP’s release.
37!? pic.twitter.com/ZL011AXgKU
— 🌙 (@ilordie) October 4, 2017
This comes as a surprise for the Norwegian DJ who has been one of dance music’s biggest names for the past two years. Stargazing is a five track EP and featured Selena Gomez, Ellie Goulding and U2 therefore the EP was predicted to pull in way more sales than it did for the first week. ‘It Ain’t Me‘, a single from the EP, had already collected half a billion streams on Spotify in July. ‘First Time‘ has over 241K streams on Soundcloud. So why did Kygo’s new EP flop?
There are several theories as to why the Kygo went “Kygone” with Stargazing. Kygo, who became famous for his tropical house sound, chose to go a different direction with his new EP. While he still has a laidback sound the DJ opts out of using steel drums and chooses to use glistening piano and chopped vocal samples. This new sound resulted in an unoriginal and lackluster EP whose singles quickly peaked before its release. Selena Gomez’s and Ellie Goulding’s star presence could only take the songs so far. The other three tracks, ‘Stargazing’, ‘This Town’, and ‘You’re the Best Thing About Me’ have failed to garner much attention.
Kygo’s previous album Cloud Nine had mixed reviews with some critics calling it “superficially pretty with little of real substance.” Kygo appeared to be riding off the success of his debut singles ‘Firestone’ and ‘Stole the Show’ which were huge international successes in 2014 and 2015.
Stargazing is only Kygo’s second album. While it may have had a humiliating release Kygo is still a young DJ with much more time to grow. He recently released his ‘Stole the Show’ documentary which gave us an inside view of his career. Let’s see how the tropical house DJ recovers from this.
