Fleetwood Mac’s Special Release Propels Them Up Five Charts
By: Hugh McIntyre
Forbes
BILLBOARD MAY 4, 2024
Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours has been a bestseller ever since it was released in 1977. Throughout the decades, the title has been able to sell consistently, rarely–if ever–falling off the charts. Interest in the set never seems to dwindle, and sometimes, the blockbuster is even able to rise once again.
The band recently released a new, collector’s version of Rumours for Record Store Day 2024. Fans could rush out to brick-and-mortar record stores to pick up a copy of a special edition picture disc of the album, which was limited to 7,500 copies. That was clearly of interest to longtime lovers of the band, as that offering helps the full-length ascend in the U.S.
Rumours climbs on five Billboard charts this week. It was present on all of them last time around, but in this frame, it’s up on all five–and significantly so on several.
On the Billboard 200, Rumours jumps more than 20 spaces (56 to 35). Fleetwood Mac’s top seller returns to the top 40 on the ranking of the most-consumed full-lengths and EPs in the nation, which is a huge accomplishment for a project that’s nearly half a century old. Greatest Hits re-enters the chart at No.191.
According to Luminate, Rumours moved another 19,693 equivalent units in the last week. That figure includes sales and streaming equivalents. It’s also up more than 15% from the period before.
Rumours was a bestseller yet again in America last week. All versions of the title sold a collective 5,274 copies throughout the country. That’s a massive 91% growth in pure purchases from the frame before the Record Store Day picture disc dropped.
This week, Rumours appears at No. 21 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart. That’s an improvement of just five spaces, but a huge gain when it comes to the total number of copies sold.
Rumours is also surging on three other tallies that it’s lived on for quite some time. Thanks largely to the Record Store Day release, it advances from No. 23 to No. 11 on the Vinyl Albums chart. Fleetwood Mac’s pop-rock project also jumps into the top 10 on the Top Rock & Alternative Albums ranking, where it jumps from No. 14 to No. 9. On the Top Rock Albums list, it’s up to No. 7. And on the Indie Store Album Sales chart it's up to No.8 from No.13 last week.
In Canada, Rumours moved up to No.36 from No.42 last week.
UPDATE: MAY 11, 2024 BILLBOARD
This week, Rumours drops to No.40 in the US from No.35 last week on the Billboard Top 200. Greatest Hits remains at No.191 after re-entering the chart last week. On the Top Album Sales chart, which is pure album sales, not including streaming, the album slid to No.28 from 21 last week. On the Top Vinyl sales chart, Rumours slides to No.24 from No.11. On the Top Rock and Alternative Albums Chart Rumours moves down one spot to No.10 from No.9 last week. On the Top Rock Albums chart Rumours also moves down one spot to No.8 from No.7 last week.
On the Canadian Top 100, Rumours moved down to No.40 from No.36 last week.
In the UK, Fleetwood Mac's 50 Years: Don’t Stop remains in the top 10 after re-entering the top 10 at No.8 last week. This week the album is No.10 with 5,701 units sold. Rumours exits the top 10 sliding to No.27 from No.9 last week with sales of 3,779 units.
Fleetwood Mac can almost always be found on albums charts in a number of major music markets. Between their greatest hits compilations and their full-length Rumours, it seems the world will always want to listen to and buy their projects.
It’s not surprising to see Fleetwood Mac on any albums chart these days, even though they haven’t released anything new in years. What might raise some eyebrows this week is that the band manages to claim not one, but two spaces on the ranking of the most-consumed songs in one nation.
This week in the U.K., Fleetwood Mac charts two tracks on the ranking of the most popular songs. Neither of them are new to the list, which may make their performance that much more impressive.
Fleetwood Mac’s highest-charting hit at the moment in the U.K. is “Everywhere,” which has found a space on the list of the top-performing cuts for some time now. That track is steady at No. 87 this frame. Many years ago, it peaked at No. 4, becoming one of the pop-rock group’s biggest hits.
Very close to the bottom of the tally comes another track from Fleetwood Mac. Their single “Dreams” returns to the songs chart in the U.K. at No. 97. It has, in the past, risen as high as No. 24, and it’s now spent 77 frames on the tally.
As Fleetwood Mac occupies a pair of spots on the songs chart, the Grammy winners manage the same feat over on the albums list. On that ranking, the band is performing much better than when it comes to songs.
Fleetwood Mac’s 50 Years - Don’t Stop keeps the group inside the top 10 for another week. The compilation dips slightly from No. 8 to No. 10, managing to find a place in the region once more.
Rumours sat inside the top 10 in the U.K. last week, but now it’s fallen–and quite far for one frame. The blockbuster project slides backward from No. 9 to No. 27, which is a noticeable tumble, especially for an older collection. That former No. 1 is one of very few efforts that have lived on the roster for more than 1,000 weeks.
There was a moment on Saturday night, shortly after Stevie Nicks took the stage at the Lovin’ Life Music Fest in uptown Charlotte, when I suddenly thought to myself, STEVIE, what in the world are you doing?? Stop it!!
To that point, the festival had weathered 18-1/2 hours over two days and nights without encountering more than a couple of gentle showers despite ominous forecasts. But then the witchiest member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame got just one song into her highly anticipated set and went ahead and said this:
“We have prayed for no rain all day — and every day for the past week — and look! There’s no rain right now.”
I knew, immediately, what was going to happen before the night was through. When the drenching downpour was unleashed over the inaugural outdoor festival a little over an hour later, however, the outcome took me by genuine surprise.
It was not something dismal. It was something divine.
Stevie Nicks finishes in a downpour
Like I said, she jinxed it.
Less than 10 minutes shy of 11 p.m. on Saturday — as Nicks charged through an encore that started with a cover of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” and continued with her appropriately witchy rendition of Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” — a spitting rain turned into a spouting rain, then a steady one.
Anyone who didn’t have a poncho was drenched by the end of “Rhiannon.” It wasn’t letting up, either. Yet she refused to rush things.
“For this last song,” she told the huge crowd, which was sticking it out through what had become a monsoon, “I would like to tell you that usually right now I talk a little bit about Christine McVie, my friend that I lost awhile ago. ... But tonight, I’m gonna change it up. ...
“I would like to dedicate this song to the four officers that were lost,” Nicks continued, referring to those killed in Charlotte last Monday. “We came in just about when it all happened, and turned on the television and there it was. And I just want you to know — from the bottom of my heart — how sorry I am.”
There were other tributes from other artists throughout the weekend, but she’s the only one I know of whose voice started shaking as she delivered hers.
In the audience, rain surely camouflaged some tears. And for the next 3 minutes and 20 seconds, as the drenching continued, Nicks beautifully warbled through one of Fleetwood Mac’s most emotive hits: “Landslide,” with its timeless message about the changes and challenges of life.
I took my love, I took it down
I climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills
‘Til the landslide brought me down
Friends and couples and singles danced in puddles like they hoped it would never end — this moment, this song, this rain, this show, this night, this festival. When it was over, they went home wet but happy.
The Official Top 40 best-selling vinyl albums of the 21st century from the 1970s, 80s and 90s revealed
The biggest vinyl albums of this century, which were released between 1970-1999 revealed.
Fleetwood Mac's Rumours has been announced as the best-selling vinyl album of the 21st century, from records that were released between 1970-1999.
As heard live across the country on Greatest Hits Radio and compiled by data from the Official Charts Company, some of the most popular and influential LPs ever recorded have made the list.
Despite never sending one of its timeless tracks to Number 1 on the Official Singles Chart (Fleetwood Mac's only UK Number 1 single remains 1968's Albatross) Rumours is one of the most successful and enduring LPs ever released in the UK - it's spent a total of 1,042 weeks inside the Official Albums Chart since its release in 1977.
This week, you'll also see Rumours is back inside the Top 10 of the Official Albums Chart, solidifying its status as one of the most popular records with the British public of all time.
According to Official Charts Company data, Rumours has logged 280,000 vinyl sales since the beginning of the new millennium.
Number 12 on the top 40 best-selling vinyl albums is Fleetwood Mac's "Greatest Hits".
Fleetwood Mac's "EVERYWHERE" single achieved 5x Platinum status in the UK today April 26, 2024 becoming Fleetwood Mac's highest certified single in the UK. 5 x Platinum represents 3 million units sold.
Since 2014 audio streams have been factored into the certification process.
April 26, 2024 - Fleetwood Mac has two albums in the UK Top 10 this week. "Rumours" jumped up to No.9 this week from No.36 on sales of 5,459 units following the release of the album on picture disc. Rumours was last in the top 10 69 week ago.
"50 Years - Don't Stop" moves back into the top 10 at No.8 from No.15 last week on sales of 5,607 units.
Fellow tortured poet, Stevie Nicks has written the introductory poem in the new Taylor Swift album.
All physical (LP and CD) copies of Taylor Swift's new album "The Tortured Poets Department" include Stevie's introductory poem.
Inscribed "For T — and me," the handwritten poem bears Nicks' graceful prose, foreshadowing what unfolds next. But there's more to the tale: Stevie's influence echoes through the album, notably in the track "Clara Bow." She embodies one of the "It" girls, evoked as: "'You look like Stevie Nicks / In '75 / The hair and lips / Crowd goes wild at her fingertips / Half moonshine / A full eclipse."
Their collaboration isn't new; they graced the stage together at the 52nd annual Grammy Awards in 2010, and performed Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon" and Taylor's "You Belong With Me."
In a Time magazine tribute that year, Nicks hailed Swift as a reflection of herself, offering glowing praise: "Taylor is writing for the universal woman and for the man who wants to know her. The female rock-'n'-roll-country-pop songwriter is back, and her name is Taylor Swift. And it's women like her who are going to save the music business."
Just last year, during a tour performance, Stevie shared how Swift's "You're on Your Own, Kid" from the "Midnights" album brought solace as she mourned her late Fleetwood Mac bandmate, Christine McVie. "Thank you to Taylor Swift for doing this thing for me, and that is writing a song called 'You're on Your Own, Kid,'" Nicks said at the time. "That is the sadness of how I feel."
Drafted in as a teenager to join older brother Tim’s band, beloved New Zealand New Wavers Split Enz, before breaking America and Europe as leader of Crowded House, Neil Finn’s deep but accessible songwriting has carved out a unique place within the musical landscape over the past four decades, earning him famous admirers ranging from members of Radiohead and Pearl Jam to Elvis Costello and Mick Fleetwood.
In this extract from our exclusive interview with Finn in the latest issue of MOJO, he discusses joining Fleetwood Mac in 2018 following the departure of Lindsey Buckingham…
Did joining Fleetwood Mac surprise you?
I was gobsmacked. I was 60 and I’d had a wonderfully diverse musical life when Mick called and said, “We’ve got rid of Lindsey, would you play with us?” I’d just done [2018 album] Lightsleeper with [Finn’s son]Liam so he had a vested interest in my not doing it, but he said, “Give it a shot,” so I auditioned.
What? Neil Finn auditioned?
It’s the only audition I’ve ever done. I went to Hawaii and Mick spent an hour telling me it wasn’t an audition, but it was. I was auditioning them too: I wasn’t sure it was the right thing, I was quite conflicted, but I liked the people and the welcome was universal.
What did you bring?
The naysayers said, “No Lindsey Buckingham, no Fleetwood Mac,” but I brought personality and the ability to sing with Stevie and Christine. I could never be capable of sounding like Lindsey but I put a similar intensity into his songs.
Have you had contact with Lindsey?
No, but I’d really like to have a dinner with him. There’s a lot of ill-will, but I don’t think he bears any towards me and I do think he had prior appreciation of the music I’d made. Hopefully, once he got over the massive disappointment, he’d have thought, “At least someone with something going for them is singing my songs.”
Who’s running Fleetwood Mac these days?
It doesn’t currently exist, but when I was there Mick carried the flag. He always has and he’s the heart and soul. Yet Stevie’s the leader in many ways, because Stevie wants it the way Stevie wants it and that’s the way it’ll be. She couldn’t bear to be in a band with Lindsey any more, but she still wanted to do it exactly the way he would have. It was more difficult for [Heartbreakers guitarist] Mike Campbell: she was really happy with the way it sounded between me and her, but she put a lot of pressure on Mike to be more like Lindsey. Sometimes Mike’s solos would go on and Stevie would get exhausted playing tambourine. She’d be, “Fucking hell, Lindsey only did 12 bars!”
Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours is already one of the bestselling and most successful albums of all time. The set was a massive commercial juggernaut when it was first released nearly 50 years ago, and it’s still performing well to this day.
This week, Rumours rises on five Billboard charts. It also finds its way back to another, different tally, meaning the project is up on half a dozen separate rankings. That’s an impressive showing for any title, let alone one that’s almost a half-century old.
Rumours reappears on this week’s Top Streaming Albums chart. The tally ranks the most-streamed full-lengths and EPs in the United States each frame.
Fleetwood Mac’s masterpiece was nowhere to be found on the Top Streaming Albums last week, but now it’s back. The favorite enters the tally at No. 46, which just so happens to be its best showing.
On the Billboard 200, Rumours returns to the top 40 in an impressive surge of consumption. The set moved another 18,144 equivalent units in the U.S. last tracking period, according to Luminate. That sum is up 5% from the frame before.
Looking specifically at pure purchases–in addition to its streaming success–Rumours is still doing very well. The title lifts from No. 30 to No. 25 on the Top Album Sales chart. This past frame, the set sold another 3,618 copies. It also advances on the Vinyl Albums ranking, where it improves from No. 23 to No. 16.
Rumours appears inside the top 10 on two Billboard charts this week, and it sits higher this frame than it did last turn. Fleetwood Mac’s bestseller is up to No. 7 on the Top Rock & Alternative Albums tally and No. 6 on the Top Rock Albums list.
Our story begins in the late 1970s in Maryland, USA. Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham are hurtling down the freeway, as they often did in those early days; a band used to constant touring. Nicks’ eyes drift up. She sees a sign – literally. It reads “Silver Spring”, the name of a nearby “edge city” in Montgomery County, near Washington. Now, the phrase won’t stop swimming around her mind: Silver Spring, Silver Spring, Silver Spring. “Silver Springs [sic] sounded like a pretty fabulous place to me,” she’d say in 1998, two decades after that drive. “‘You could be my silver springs…’ that's just a whole symbolic thing of what you could have been to me.”
The words became Fleetwood Mac’s “Silver Springs”, a break-up song written by Nicks about the end of a passionate, often tumultuous, on-off relationship with guitarist and singer Buckingham that had began back in high school. It was intended to appear on Rumours, their seminal 1977 album. But the band vetoed it for being too long. “I was so genuinely devastated… because I loved the song and it was one of the Rumours songs,” Nicks told MTV in 1997. “So I never thought that ‘Silver Springs’ would ever be heard of again. My beautiful song just disappeared.”
But it didn’t disappear. Not in the way she thought it might. In 1997, the band performed the song at Warner Bros studio during The Dance tour and it very quickly became a sensation, winning a Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance in the process. And that image, at the song's climactic end point – of Nicks singing the words at Buckingham, her eyes burning into his soul, as if casting a spell, 20 years after writing the lyrics and still meaning them – has become the stuff of legend: “I'll follow you down til' the sound of my voice will haunt you / You'll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you.”
“Silver Springs” was big in the ‘90s. But in more recent years, the song has gained a surprising amount of renewed traction – particularly among Gen Z, who's parents might not have even been alive when it was written. On YouTube, the performance has a vast 25 million views. And on TikTok, where the collective obsession has reached fever pitch, the search “Silver Springs” has over 100 million views. We're seeing young people lip-syncing the words, mascara running down their cheeks or, as in one clip I saw, kids in class playing the song at their “year 7 exes.” Nicks burning a hole into Buckingham with her words really strikes a chord. As one TikTok user captioned over the clip: “Don't just write a song about your ex, make him play lead guitar and sing it right to his face on stage.”
It's easy to see why it still resonates – it's a captivating, enchanting song that's bolstered by the real-life drama that simmers beneath it. But why now? And why hasn't the hysteria surrounding “Silver Springs” died down? Even I'm guilty of it. It'll pop up on my TikTok and I'll watch it over and over again, on a dopamine loop. It has an addictive quality; the layering of their voices, the pummelling drums, the electric stare-off, how Nicks weaves between vengefulness and vulnerability within the space of a line (“Give me just a chance”). The live version has a particular potency – the recorded “Silver Springs” slaps, but it's not quite the same.
For a lot of people, the “Silver Springs” obsession actually began last year with Daisy Jones & the Six, Amazon's hit show based on the Taylor Jenkins Reid book of the same name which itself was loosely based on Fleetwood Mac. “I remember reading in interviews that Sam Claflin and Riley Keough [who play Daisy and Billie in the show] had been watching ‘Silver Springs’ in preparation, so that got me onto it,” says 19-year-old Eva, who listens to the song when she gets ready for college “at least three times a week.” As she says, “The real thing is even better than the show because it's real, you know?”
This seems to be a running theme. 22-year-old Kai tells me that they wanted to hear the song that “Regret Me” (a song that appears in the show) was based on, which led them to becoming “completely obsessed” with the real thing. Katie, 24, tells me that she didn’t even watch Daisy Jones & The Six, but the song “was all over social media at that time” because of it, which led her down a rabbit hole. “I listened to it so many times that it ended up on my 2023 Spotify Wrapped,” she says. “This was also around the time that my boyfriend and I broke up, so the lyrics held special significance for me.”
Of course the song hits today as much as it always has. But there's something especially 2020s about the romanticisation of drama and pain, the “main character energy” of elevating an on-off relationship to almost mythical status. “Culturally, we’re seeing an obsession with stories about unconventional, years-long relationships (Normal People, Past Lives and One Day),” says Katie. “‘Silver Springs’ has that same theme; Stevie and Lindsay take ‘it’s complicated’ to a whole new level. I think people – especially young people – resonate with this idea of having a relationship like this; a lifelong love. It’s messy, it’s romantic, it’s relatable. I also think there’s something so satisfying about looking your ex in the eye after 20 years and singing your breakup song to them.”
This is also an era in which big, mainstream artists just aren't as open-hearted and unhinged as they used to be. We don't know anything about their private lives beyond what they pretend to let us in on. Even Taylor Swift, a popstar who's forged a billion-dollar empire off writing about her exes, tends to keep her raw emotion behind a shiny, carefully thought-out, manufactured narrative. Harry Styles is one of the biggest artists in the world, yet we know very little about his actual life: his relationships, his hopes, his heartbreaks. There's a truth and authenticity that sits at the heart of “Silver Springs” that might not exist today, at a time when artists don't often allow themselves to step outside of the slick, choreographed version of what a break-up actually feels and looks like (deranged, irrational, messy).
When Nicks wrote “Silver Springs”, who knows whether she really thought that Buckingham would never get away from the sound of the woman that loves him. But it's nearly 50 years later, and the song is still playing, on a loop. Last year, 74-year-old Buckingham posted the “Silver Springs” guitar solo on TikTok alongside the caption: “I hear we're talking about that ‘97 ‘Silver Springs’ again…” “You know damn well that's not the part we mean,” reads the top comment. He's never gotten away. Neither have we.
The Official Top 300 most-streamed songs (in the Uk) from the 70s, 80s and 90s
Greatest Hits Radio has revealed the UK's Official Top 300 most-streamed songs from the 70s, 80s and 90s. Fleetwood Mac have 8 tracks in the tally with two in the top 5.
Songs
#
Title
Artist
Year
3
EVERYWHERE
FLEETWOOD MAC
1987
4
DREAMS
FLEETWOOD MAC
1977
11
THE CHAIN
FLEETWOOD MAC
1977
18
GO YOUR OWN WAY
FLEETWOOD MAC
1976
113
LITTLE LIES
FLEETWOOD MAC
1987
135
LANDSLIDE
FLEETWOOD MAC
1975
138
EDGE OF SEVENTEEN
STEVIE NICKS
1981
250
DON'T STOP
FLEETWOOD MAC
1977
260
RHIANNON
FLEETWOOD MAC
1975
With the first quarter of the year over, The Official Charts in the UK have revealed the biggest albums so far in 2024. "50 Years - Don't Stop" is No.6 and "Rumours" is No.25.
The Top 40 biggest vinyl albums of the year so far.
"Rumours" on vinyl is a constant seller, not surprised to see it place within the top 10. So far this year it's at No.6 on the top 40 best selling vinyl albums in the UK.
Dr. Raven Baxter was 30 years old when she heard Fleetwood Mac for the first time. She says she barely slept for 48 hours afterward.
The molecular biologist, science communicator and podcaster went viral for live tweeting her reactions to Fleetwood Mac's 1977 album "Rumours."
It all began when Baxter took a seat at a bar hotel in Nebraska.
"I was trying to get some work done after I finished the day, and there’s music playing in the background," she tells TODAY.com. "I’m on my second margarita. I’m typing away at my computer, and I’m hearing this (guy) singing his a-- off. I’m like, 'There’s something going on. I gotta like at least look up the song and see who is this person?"
Baxter says this was the first time she actively heard Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way," a hit led by the band's lead guitarist, Lindsey Buckingham.
To have a better listen, Baxter says she gathered her setup at the bar and went back up to her hotel room.
"I unpacked everything, and I was like, 'OK, we're doing this,'' she explains.
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