There’s no denying that Lizzo is a singular artist. After exploding on the scene in 2019, she went on to land a string of hits with the ubiquitous “Juice,” “About Damn Time,” and “Good as Hell,” picking up Grammys and other accolades along the way. Not a traditional pop singer, she infused her music with funky horns, hip-hop grooves, and even the flute. She overindexed for bops, but was there a Lizzo sound? Depends on the track.
Lizzo first began chipping away at her fifth studio album, Bitch, around four years ago. The album underwent a number of transformations during that time. It was initially meant to be titled Love in Real Life, supported by a single of the same name and the disco-pop track “Still Bad,” both of which arrived last year. While Lizzo was still making up her mind about what she wanted her next album cycle to embody, it seems the broader pop audience already made up its mind about her.
Bitch arrived on June 5 via Atlantic Records. Within its first week, the album sold 2,649 copies and racked up just under 2.7 million on-demand streams, according to music data company Luminate. In its second week, sales dropped to 650 units, while streams dipped to just under 900,000. It’s a steep drop from her previous album, 2022’s Special, which debuted with 39,000 copies sold and 69,000 equivalent album units earned, enough for a Number Two debut on the Billboard 200. Bitch somehow managed to evade the chart entirely. Time is of the essence for most pop artists, and yet her brief absence doesn’t entirely explain such an abrupt fall. What does?
“I think the biggest reason is that she never had a core fanbase,” one former senior label executive who requested anonymity tells Rolling Stone. “She was a very song-driven, radio-hits-driven artist who lacked a core fanbase, and that’s what you need today for career longevity.” Lizzo considered this perspective herself. Earlier this month, she credited perceived changes in the primary consumption model of music for limiting her audience. “The industry changed so much in the last 3 yrs. streaming replaced radio & I was a radio darling,” she wrote on X. “That’s how my fans discovered my music.”
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Lizzo’s most recent Hot 100 hit, “Special,” featuring SZA, spent 10 weeks on the chart in 2023. While the single peaked at Number 52, it reached Number 19 on the Radio Songs chart and Number 15 on the Pop Airplay chart. The success of Special was largely bolstered by the breakout singles “About Damn Time” and “2 Be Loved (Am I Ready).”
“I speak like a manager, that’s all BS to me,” industry pundit Ray Daniels tells Rolling Stone of placing the blame on streaming. “If you know that the industry is changing, you should be warning your fans ahead of time. Why are you not telling your fans to request your song on radio? They’re your fans, they’ll do what you ask them to do.” However, there is the factor that the trust between Lizzo and her audience has been deeply fractured in recent years.
In her post, Lizzo also acknowledged “the very obvious & public attack on my career” that largely shifted public opinion against her favor. In 2023, her former backup dancers accused her of sexual harassment, creating a hostile work environment, and fat-shaming in a lawsuit that has still yet to be settled. Last month, Lizzo sat down with Gayle King on CBS Mornings and stated she would rather prepare for trial than opt for an easy settlement. “I’m not afraid of the truth,” she added. “The truth is less salacious than the headlines.”
She’s already lost too much goodwill, anyway. Settling won’t bring it back. “A big part of her brand was being the underdog and being very self-confident, I am who I am, I support everyone, body positivity,” the former senior label exec continued. “And when you’re called to task for the mistreatment of exactly what you held out as being your, quote-unquote, brand, then fans don’t wanna see you win anymore, and they desert you.”
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In the three years between Special and Bitch, Lizzo began bracing herself for a sharp decline in public interest by creating music that existed on the outskirts of what audiences came to know her for. The 2025 mixtape My Face Hurts From Smiling sourced beats from longtime collaborator Ricky Reed and Zaytoven for her first venture into rap in a long while. Her debut album, 2013’s Lizzobangers, emphasized her interest in hip-hop as a performer; but most listeners who discovered her through Cuz I Love You in 2019 were unfamiliar with the project, which was removed from streaming services for a year while she campaigned for the 2020 Grammy Awards.
“This mixtape is like, ‘I’m going to just say it. I don’t give a fuck. All right’: ‘I’ve been fat, and I’ve been skinny/Bitches still ain’t fucking with me,’” Lizzo told Rolling Stone last year. “I don’t think that could ever be on a Lizzo song. I would’ve been so scared to put that in something like ‘About Damn Time’ or ‘Juice.’” Bitch, despite being created with Reed in tandem with My Face Hurts From Smiling, leans more pop and R&B with lyrics that may have been dulled down for palatability.
“Musically, I don’t know what she’s been doing,” another veteran music-industry executive tells Rolling Stone. “I assume she’s not making the records like she used to, that resonate the way that the other ones did because they were very infectious and formatted, doo-wop type pop records with sassy meme language in it.” In a review of the album, Rolling Stone wrote, “Bitch is full of tired moves and cynical appeals to the streaming algorithm.”
So far, neither radio nor streaming has latched onto any of the three singles from Bitch — “Don’t Make Me Love U” arrived in March, followed by title track “Bitch” (which interpolates 1997’s Meredith Brooks song of the same name) in May and “Sexy Ladies,” which was serviced as a single one week after the album’s release. A collaboration with D.C. band UCB, “Sexy Ladies” is the most likely hit from the record. Crafted with the late producer Tay Keith, who died last week at the age of 29, the single is an ode to summer in the South, with the potential for global reach.
The thing is, reach comes at a cost. There was a time when labels paid top dollar to promote a song to radio, all but ensuring exposure which would lead to other sources of revenue, be it album sales, concert tickets, or merchandise. Today, the cost of mass exposure is more affordable, but is it genuine when you’re effectively spamming social media with feigned enthusiasm? This is where budgets come in, and today’s majors have to be realistic about their rosters. Says the veteran industry executive: “They’re gonna phone it in and give her the rollout that feels like they’re spending something, but it’s super lackluster, probably not very championed, right? And if something goes, great. Because that’s what happened last time.” (Representatives for Lizzo did not respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.)
Lizzo inked her deal with Atlantic Records in 2016, three years before “Truth Hurts” appeared in Netflix’s Someone Great and struck viral gold on TikTok, which was only just truly emerging as a formidable force in the music industry after rebranding from Musical.ly a year prior. To date, “Truth Hurts” has been streamed more than 1 billion times on Spotify. “It was a fluke, her blowing up,” the veteran industry executive continued. “Nobody went and put millions of dollars behind her.” (It’s worth noting that the executive team which signed Lizzo to the Warner Music label has changed; Atlantic is now headed by Elliot Grainge, son of Universal Music Group head Sir Lucian Grainge, a business competitor — par for the course in the nepo-favoring music industry.)
Lizzo made the most of the moment. She made her Saturday Night Live debut in December 2019 and just a few months later took home the Grammy Award for Best Pop Solo Performance for “Truth Hurts” and Best Urban Contemporary Album for Cuz I Love You. She sustained the momentum through “About Damn Time,” which was awarded Record of the Year in 2023. “She is positioned to really be more successful than a lot of artists, so it is baffling,” the veteran industry executive said. “But it also shows you a classic industry underbelly fact, which is that the music industry does not care about its legacy artists at all, actually. If you fall off, you’re literally like nothing to your labels, or to anything.”
In May, Lizzo took promotion for Bitch into her own hands. “My label won’t hang posters, so I will do it myself,” she said in a social media video showing herself putting up promo material as a one-woman street team. “You have 26.4 million people that follow you on TikTok and 11.2 million on Instagram, people that you can press a button and talk to and you still blaming the label,” Daniels says. “You mean to tell me instead of you talking to the fans about your music, you’re talking to the fans about how the label is not promoting your music?”
It isn’t uncommon for labels to look toward an existing fanbase as a prerequisite for showing interest in an artist. It mitigates their risk and offers confidence in their investments. But without proof of potential streams and sales, they have to be willing to take the chance. Most aren’t. “It’s very political and very much about where money is going. Everywhere it’s like that. It’s about money and power behind an artist,” the veteran industry executive said. “That’s why artists loved Clive Davis and Jimmy Iovine, because they would take a Lizzo and they would lift her up if she was not doing so well.”
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During the same summer of Special, Sam Smith scored one of their most enduring hits in years with Kim Petras on “Unholy.” This year, Zara Larsson achieved the breakthrough she’d been working towards for an entire decade, notably aided by an unmistakable and vibrant visual aesthetic and hits with just enough charm to stick. When it comes to the nature of pop in 2026, it would be unwise to count out a comeback for almost any artist. “I think there’s always hope for every artist. A hit cures all,” the veteran industry executive said. “But it can take many years, or it could never come.”
Where does Lizzo go from here? “I don’t think she’s done at all,” Daniels says. “This is just a moment to remind her that she still has work to do.”
