With R. Kelly on trial, what happened to his music?

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As a veteran Chicago wedding DJ, Richard Gintowt has a lot of history with R. Kelly.

Growing up, hits like Ignition (Remix) and Step in the Name of Love were ubiquitous local favorites of the local R&B star, and when Gintowt started making the soundtrack for wedding parties, Bump n Grind had the ‘used to crush it for me, he recalls.

But in 2019, amid renewed fury over decades of allegations that Kelly had systematically abused young women, the DJ, now living in the Bay Area, completely stopped playing Kellys’ music. The only time Gintowt recently spun Ignition at the behest of a bride, the experience only strengthened his position.

It was immediately a mood killer, Gintowt said. Everyone on the dance floor stopped and looked at me like, what are you doing?

For some, the rejection of Kellys’ music was long overdue, a belated calculation for a star pursued by misconduct charges. (Kelly has denied the allegations.) Yet even as his federal trial begins in Brooklyn this week, he faces charges of racketeering based on child sexual exploitation, kidnapping and forced labor. Kellys’ musical legacy remains far from simple.

In some ways Kelly, 54, stands out as an emblem of the so-called cancellation culture, with her music featuring hits like I Believe I Can Fly and The Worlds Greatest all but wiped out from radio and other commercial placements. , its large-scale concerts and record sales are a thing of the past.

Still, data shows that the popularity of his music online has remained remarkably stable in recent years. Since January 2019, when the documentary series Lifetime Surviving R. Kelly finally turned public opinion against it, Kelly’s music has had around 780 million audio streams in the United States not counting YouTube videos, where it also remains popular. and his work is promoted on hundreds of official playlists. On Spotify, it attracts 5.2 million listeners each month.

Looking at Kelly’s performances across multiple streaming and social media platforms, data service Chartmetric ranks her among the Top 500 Music Artists, on a par with Michael Bubl and Carrie Underwood. On TikTok, some of the most influential influencer platforms have used his music to make the soundtrack for their posts, placing his total views on the same level as J. Cole and Frank Ocean.

Such a dichotomy may be the fate of superstar artists accused of grossly mischief outcasts in some places, but with enduring works that still attract large audiences. In the case of Michael Jackson, the subject of another 2019 documentary alleging sexual abuse, the commercial impact was minimal in fact, the Jacksons song streams increased.

Critic and filmmaker Dream Hampton, executive producer of Surviving R. Kelly, called what Kelly has experienced in recent years as a kind of social death, in which businesses and ordinary members of society exercise instructors, Uber drivers , BBQ DJs in the backyard form a collective. decision to stop kissing an artist.

Hampton noted that the documentary itself was not a call for a boycott, no survivors said that in the project. But social death doesn’t happen without some sort of narrative that helps consumers make up their minds, she added, tracing this path from the righteous activism that sought to cut off Kelly’s financial resources through the Lifetime series. and the criminal charges that followed.

He’s not just muted or denied, he’s in jail, Hampton said.

Even before 2000, when the Chicago Sun-Times published the first major investigation into Kelly’s abuse allegations, the singer had been followed by rumors and accusations of misconduct. Throughout the 1990s, he settled lawsuits accusing him of having had sex with underage girls; in 1994, at age 27, Kelly married Aaliyah, her then 15-year-old protégé, allegedly using false documents.

In 2002, Kelly was charged with child pornography after a video was released which authorities said showed the singer urinating and having sex with an underage girl. He was acquitted in 2008. But Kelly thrived before, during and after the controversy, releasing 12 platinum albums in all. He’s collaborated with stars like Jay-Z, Whitney Houston, Lady Gaga, and Chance the Rapper, and headlined major festivals in the 2010s.

The tide started to turn against Kelly in 2017, when Jim DeRogatis, who had long covered the Kelly case, reported for BuzzFeed News that the singer was locking young women into an abusive cult. A popular campaign called #MuteRKelly gained traction that summer, targeting the singer’s label, RCA Records, as well as radio stations, streaming services and concert halls.

By this point, Kelly’s influence was waning, he hadn’t scored any Top 40 hits for a decade, and the campaign against him coincided with the momentum of #MeToo. The singer saw his performances picketed and then canceled, while Spotify announced, and then repealed, a policy banning the promotion of artists, like Kelly, whose personal conduct was deemed hateful.

After Surviving R. Kelly aired, with compelling testimonies from his alleged victims, in January 2019, RCA removed the singer from its roster and some of his former collaborators apologized, while law enforcement investigations in several states continued the allegations again. .

There was a long time when you could have enough plausible deniability, and then in an instant it ended collectively, said Peter Rosenberg, DJ and morning show host for New Yorks Hot 97 (97.1 FM ), who called Kelly completely dead at the station.

There are a lot of people who have a lot of controversy getting played on, Rosenberg said. But for Kelly, this was the documentary that really resonated so loudly that it just got people to never play it. The TV series, he added, took our hands out of our eyes and was like, you have to watch this.

Radio, where song playlists are part of a station’s identity, is a barometer of audience taste. Since the Lifetime documentary, the spread of Kellys’ music has plunged and has never recovered. Jackson, on the other hand, remains regularly popular on the air.

Online, the two stars are not diminished.

According to MRC Data, a tracking service used to compile Billboards charts, Kellys catalog feeds have remained essentially stable in the United States for the past four and a half years.

In early 2017, shortly after the release of Kellys ‘latest studio album, 12 Nights of Christmas, which peaked at # 177 in Kellys’ catalog, averaged around five million streams each week. Today it’s just over six million a week, having fluctuated within that range continuously for the past four years.

The only exception came in early 2019, when Surviving R. Kelly aired and Kelly’s weekly numbers briefly increased to about double their usual level, likely due to interest in the film.

According to Chartmetric, Kelly’s music remains on around 300 official playlists on Spotify and Apple Music, as well as around 100 on Amazon Music; at each point of sale, these numbers have increased steadily over the past year.

Some of the playlists are algorithmically generated for more passive listeners, based on a given year’s best hits or artist collaborations, while others, like Spotifys Secret Genius with R. Kelly, put its music in the spotlight more directly for the dedicated fans who remain.

Jacksons’ circulation totals in the United States have more than doubled over the past four years, from an average of around eight million per week in early 2017 to nearly 19 million per week today, with a peak at every Halloween for Thriller.

Kelly’s recordings remain the property of RCA, a division of Sony Music, while her copyright is controlled by Universal. According to industry estimates, a total of 780 million Kellys steamers in the United States since the start of 2019 would typically generate around $ 3 million in payments to rights holders. Neither Sony nor Universal would comment on the current state of Kelly’s music.

Kenyette Tisha Barnes, founder of #MuteRKelly, said she considers the campaign a success, despite continued interest in the Singers’ Catalog. Hes on sustaining life as an artist, said Barnes. It took 30 years to bring it to this level.

At first, the activists’ strategy was to cripple Kelly’s ability to use money to control her alleged victims with her celebrity lifestyle and legal maneuvers like confidential settlements. This phase was successful, said Barnes, who also highlighted technological victories like Spotify’s option to shut down artists altogether.

Now, she said, our goal is to be the authors and architects of her legacy to make Kelly’s alleged crimes inseparable from her greatest successes.

People see him as the king of R&B with an asterisk, Barnes said.

Rosenberg, the radio personality, was more definitive than Kelly, he said, became the asterisk.

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