This one, Thursday, featured a guest vocal by Drake, and garnered equally approving reviews. Meanwhile, thanks to Drake tweets, The Weeknd's own Twitter account picked up an army of followers.įive months later, a second free mixtape went up online.
The music press reacted with a chorus of hallelujahs. A few weeks later, The Weeknd's own website offered a nine-song mixtape called House of Balloons as a free download. Sexy and dangerous, it's an approach that has excited listeners and incited discussion online since March of last year, when fellow Torontonian Drake posted a link to a Weeknd track called Wicked Game. His sound is hardly party music it's more like the after-party, with his sweet, plaintive tenor floating like cigarette smoke over darkly atmospheric synths and a slow, almost narcotic groove. But then, The Weeknd isn't a typical R&B artist. Tellingly, Trilogy is the only R&B album in the iTunes Top 10. Online sales, which theoretically would be most likely to have been blunted by free downloads, are also strong, with Trilogy trailing only One Direction's Take Me Home on iTunes' album chart, placing it well ahead of new albums by pop diva/TV star Christina Aguilera, reunited alt-rockers Soundgarden and punk perennials Green Day.
"It's going to easily be a Top 5 record in the first week." (Canadian sales figures will be released early next week.) "It looks like it's going to be 100,000 copies sold in the first week in the U.S.," says Randy Lennox, president and CEO of Universal Music Canada. In an industry that runs on hype, The Weeknd's ultra-low profile is hardly an obvious fit.Īnd yet Trilogy, which was released Tuesday, is shaping up as a sizable hit. Making the deal seem even more improbable was the fact that Abel Tesfaye – the 22-year old Scarborough native who sings, writes and produces as The Weeknd – is notoriously press-shy, and had done little touring or concert-playing. had signed the Canadian R&B act The Weeknd and were going to re-release three mix-tapes that had previously been available as free downloads on the Web.
The old adage no doubt occurred to more than a few people in the music business when it was announced in September that Universal Music Canada and Republic Records in the U.S. Nobody's going to buy the cow when they can get the milk for free.
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