She’s responsible for a handful of the biggest pop songs of the mid-noughties, but US pop star Meghan Trainor has suffered a series of brutal career setbacks recently.
The latest came this week with the news her newly-released seventh studio album Toy With Me had debuted on the US Billboard 200 album charts … at #198.
It’s a dramatic fall from grace for an artist who, just over a decade ago, scored a US number one album with her debut, Title, home to the hits All About That Bass, Dear Future Husband and Like I’m Gonna Lose You.
That album ended up as the fifth-highest selling of 2015 in the US, shifting more than three million copies.
Toy With Me fared better here in Australia, charting at #53 – although it was the first time one of Trainor’s albums had charted here outside the top 40. Her first album Title was, as in the US, a chart-topping multi-platinum success here which finished 2015 as our fifth-highest selling album of the year.
The disastrous debuting for her new album comes after Trainor was forced to cancel her entire US tour last month, explaining that she needed to focus on her family instead.
“After a lot of reflection and some really tough conversations, I’ve made the difficult decision to cancel the ‘Get in Girl’ tour,” she wrote on Instagram in mid-April.
“Balancing the release of a new album, preparing for a nationwide tour, and welcoming our new baby girl to our growing family of five has just been more than I can take on right now.”
Trainor, 32, and her husband Daryl Sabara, welcomed their third child together in January, a girl named Mikey Moon Trainor.
The tour had been scheduled to run from June 12 to August 15, and had been struggling to shift tickets before announcing the cancellation. She’s not alone there: A number of big-name artists have axed their US tours in recent weeks, after booking large venues and struggling to sell seats.
Among them, girl group the Pussycat Dolls, whose latest reunion now lies in tatters after their entire North American tour was cancelled due to low ticket sales. The noughties girl group had booked venues that could hold audiences as large as 25,000 – but by last month, just weeks before the tour was due to begin, many dates were showing just a few hundred tickets sold. The Nicole Scherzinger-led three piece this week announced that they were axing all bar one US date after “taking an honest look” at how the tour was selling.
Post Malone and Zayn Malik have also cancelled or postponed their US tours amid what’s been dubbed “blue dot fever” – the blue dots showing unsold seats on ticketing websites.