Moth 2 The Flame

Janet has acknowledged her via mixing in Tinashe's Nasty with her own Nasty song during her Together Again tour back in 2024, plus she selected her to perform Pleasure Principle dance routine for her 2015 tribute at the BET Awards over a decade ago and thanked her. PitchforkCiara, Tinashe, and Jason Derulo Honor Janet Jackson with...Watch below

Janet with her Hot 100 #1 song Black Cat, that it even charted top 10 as a Billboard mainstream top 40 crossover Rock radio airplay charts. Not sure if any other pop girl actually managed to achieve that. But let's not forget Miss Ashlee Simpson cleared the mid-00s pop/rock girls with La La

Just listened to the album and first impressions is I'm a bit underwhelmed, mainly due to some pretty mid-boring tracks dragging the album down but there are a couple of songs that are really good that kinda saves it from being absolute garbage. Ones that stood out to me are: Canada Dry - this should've been the lead single, such a hypnotic dance song made for the clubs Party - I don't mind the talk-singing on this and the Madonna Music sample elevates it along with the production Embarrassingly - a really beautiful acoustic guitar driven song that fits perfectly for the summer/spring vibe Troye Meets World - another beautiful track, this time with fast melancholic piano/staccato production Lost Time - Not sure if it's just me, but it seems like Troye was really trying to push and improve his vocals on this track and his harmonies and runs sounds really good here, just worried that due to the production and mixing of his vocals on this track (vocoder effect) that it'll be hard for him to replicate it in a live performance. Le Boy might need to grow on me but at the moment I love the last minute of the song but not really too impressed with the first half. The rest of the tracks were pretty unmemorable to me so can't say much, might need another listen again.

I'm also happy she's finally breaking out into the mainstream with more success now, but I fear it's gonna be a bloodbath trying to get tickets (especially VIP ones) for her next tour once she gets her Espresso moment and possibly be able to tour in arena venues. I was very lucky I managed to get VIP tickets and front barricade GA for her Match My Freak tour relatively easy when tickets went on sale for Australian dates, and VIP ticket prices wasn't that crazy expensive. Not confident that would be the case again once she gets her Sabrina Carpenter moment.

https://www.officialcharts.com/charts/official-hip-hop-and-r-and-b-albums-chart/20261002/115/ #1 on the UK R&B albums chart but if we're being honest, Popstar is more than just an R&B album imo but it's nice seeing it's #1 on an actual music chart in a major music market even if it's a sub-genre one.

The album is back at #1 on iTunes in Australia at the start of the 2nd tracking week I honestly thought it'd drop off and out of the top 200 in the 2nd week but Popstar seems to be getting lots of word of mouth about how good it is and more people seem to be checking it out.

Even worse...(well funnier) is that on the latest news blog article on the ARIA's website talking about new album entries, they got the name of Tinashe's new album wrong! Taylor Swift comes back for an encore - ARIAJulia Jacklin scores the #1 Australian Album "POPULAR"

They were advertised as "available for a limited time" from the email notices Tinashe's store sent out to subscribers, which often means only for like the last 2-3 days during opening tracking week to gather as much digital sales as possible to get a high debut entry for the Billboard charts or other countries local music charts, at least from what I've noticed anyway from a few other artists who have released similar bonus track/instrumental and acapella editions online mid-way during release week (Ariana with petal & Melanie C with Sweat). The thing is in Tinashe's case with Popstar, them removing the bonus tracks edition of the album from iTunes store only ends up hurting their album campaign imo. People were buying that particular edition because it seemed like the flip remix versions was what caught their interests enough to buy it digitally, since those remixes are still not available for streaming. The standard edition of the album isn't really charting high on iTunes in much places anymore other than a few countries compared to when the bonus tracks edition was still available on there and she was still #1 in 20+ countries iTunes chart even when the 1st tracking week was over.

Australian GP finally waking up to Tinashe! On a side note, it sucks the bonus tracks edition of the album has been removed on iTunes now (along with the video, instrumental and acapella editions) as that was the edition that was selling the album and giving her exposure to those who still used that platform to purchase music. They should've kept it on the store in addition to the standard edition instead of advertising it as available only for a limited time. I hope they eventually put up that bonus edition on streaming platforms soon to give the album some longevity as it seemed like the bonus flip/remix version tracks was gaining her a lot of new listeners and fans.

Highlights from my first initial listen are Brainrot, Nobody Wanna Dance Anymore, Sunglasses & Popstar for album tracks. I can see people hating on Flashbacks though since it's very minimalistic in production like Red Flags from Quantum Baby. Nobody Wanna Dance Anymore is probably the gag of the album for a lot of people. Overall it's a solid album but the short duration of some of the tracks kinda leaves you wishing it could've been longer to flesh it out more since it feels like it moves on too quick from it, particularly I'd Rather Be Alone & Brainrot tracks.

Yes, and? I still wrote all that to let everyone see that Spotify does merge streams even if you're trying to be obtuse, in this case it's Janet's useless team not bothering to fix up her Spotify streams, doesn't matter if they aren't merged now since the album version of STCML will cross 100M anyway with today's update

It's mixed results, they merge streams of different edits or remixes for some artists but don't for others that it's been noticeable just even last month, or at least they're testing it. More importantly, it seems like a lot of pre-streaming era artists often don't have their different versions/edits of their songs merged due to the song's track length differing by a few seconds/minutes and/or data submissions from the label/team on the platform, which doesn't show the overall picture of the main version of the song's streams. A post 10 years ago on Spotify's community message board revealed a combination of criteria needed to be matched for song's streams to be merged, and track length was one of them. TL:DR: Spotify does merge streams from different versions/edits depending on matching criterias and label/team fixing it.

It reached 100M streams months ago with the album version & single edit streams combined, but it's great that now it's easily noticeable from the album version showing the 100M streams.

The poster is available to buy separately on their store but I think it was a little cheaper when it was bundled with the boxset https://store.thespicegirls.com/collections/accessories/products/make-it-last-forever-poster

The poster editions of the vinyl and cd boxset sold out already Oh well, I'll wait to see if the normal editions without the poster will still be in stock next week before I put in my order.