Miley Cyrus is dropping a whole new single on Thursday night.
This seems odd since Miley’s “Flowers” was the biggest hit on 2023, from her album “Endless Summer Vacation.” It’s sold the equivalent of 5.3 million copies including streaming.
But while “Flowers” is still on the charts since the beginning of the year, the album is not. “Endless Summer Vacation” sold the equivalent of 850,000 copies and just 110,000 actual paid downloads and CDs. The album never produced a big follow up single, either. “Flowers” — even though it’s by an established artist– has acted more like a one off hit, a la (for example) Carly Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe.”
So Miley will try to revive the album this week by releasing a new song, “Used to Be Young,” which will be added to “Endless Summer Vacation” and added to an updated documentary that will air on ABC this Friday. The documentary without “Used to Be Young” ran back in April on Disney Plus. The updated version will have a new interview with Miley plus the video for the new song.
It’s a head scratcher why radio didn’t give a follow up hit to “Flowers.” The same thing happened to Adele’s “Easy on Me.” The record company (in both cases, Sony) kind of just the first hit go very big and didn’t put a lot of elbow grease into a successor. In the old days of the biz you could get two or three hits out of an album. These days, with streaming milking all the tracks simultaneously, it’s a nearly impossible task.
No word yet on who wrote “Used to Be Young” but the snippet of lyrics released last week could be sung to the tune of “Flowers” in that cadence. Don’t fix what isn’t broken.
