Country artist Morgan Wallen is no longer in timeout on local country radio.
Around Memorial Day weekend, both major country stations in Atlanta ― 94.9/The Bull and Kicks 101.5 ― added back two of his biggest hits, “Chasing You” and “Whiskey Glasses,” into modest rotation, usually once a day for each. Neither station has placed any songs from his most recent album, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” in regular rotation. He had three hit singles off that album, “More Than a Hometown,” “7 Summers” and “Sand in My Boots.”
Both stations temporarily dropped all his songs in February after TMZ released video of a drunken Wallen using a racial epithet toward a white friend outside his home in Nashville, captured by a neighbor.
Backlash was swift. Within days, hundreds of radio stations had stopped playing his songs. Awards shows dropped the 28-year-old singer as a performer. Streaming services stopped featuring his music on certified playlists (though they allowed users to keep playing them on demand.) Wallen’s concert tours were nixed. But his record label Big Loud/Republic only suspended him and eventually reinstated him.
At the same time, his fan base rallied around him and continued to purchase his music and play his songs on streaming services.
And Wallen’s “Dangerous” remains the best-selling album of the year so far and has been No. 1 on the Billboard country album chart now for a whopping 26 weeks. Through the first six months of this year, the album sold 2.108 million album equivalent sales, a complicated composite formula incorporating on-demand music streams, YouTube video views, physical and digital album sales, and other formats like song downloads.
Wallen, right after the video came out, apologized for what he did and in an interview with Michael Strahan on “Good Morning America” recently, Wallen admitted to a reasonable amount of ignorance surrounding his use of the word in question.
“I was around some of my friends, and we just ... we say dumb stuff together,” Wallen said on “GMA.” “And it was ― in our minds, it’s playful ... that sounds ignorant, but it ― that’s really where it came from ... and it’s wrong.”
After the incident, he said he spent a month in a rehab facility in San Diego to address his drinking issues.
He also donated $500,000 to different non-profit organizations including Black Music Action Coalition (BMAC), an advocacy group fighting for fair treatment of Black artists in the music industry.
Nationally, Mediabase 24/7 tracked more than 130 stations who spun Wallen’s “Chasin You” and “Whiskey Glasses” at least once last week. On Spotify, “Whiskey Glasses” is his most popular song, with more than 350 million spins to date with 8.7 million listeners in the past month.
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