#i work in vacation sales and my company has not said a peep yet about severe weather policy being in affect

[xeniawarriorprincesa]

So im a born and raised Floridian and dont bat an eye at a majority of hurricanes or tropical storms but this one is actually looking to be a threat this time. Please think of your Floridians this week. We are about to get a direct hit and some models showing possibility for a Cat 4.

[topweeklyupdate]

TØP Weekly(/Monthly) Update #44: Well That Was Fast (7/23/17)

How goes, friends. Three weeks ago, I wrote what I thought would be my last weekly update for at least several months. “They’re going on hiatus,” they said, “You won’t have enough content for months.” they said. But they didn’t count on one thing: Joshua. William. Dun.

...And, actually, a few other things. The last three weeks have given us more than enough content to give all two of you who have missed my combination of rambling and dorkery your fix. Again, I write this thinking it will be the last time I’ll write anything for several months, but who’s to say?

This Week’s TØPics:  

Sleepers and Closing the Eye

Josh at the APMAs/WTF is DEMA?

Goldfinger Album Release

We Know That Our Band Did Well in 2016... But How Well?

Major News and Announcements:

There’s been a fair bit of shenaniganry since the boys put a cap on the Blurryface Era. First, as expected, Mark dropped the final Sleepers vid. Peeps cried. Mark got some great shots. Josh got a boo-boo playing in the ocean at Hangout. Artopia notably wasn’t featured, which was a little disappointing, but it was still a great vid. The Sleepers series ended with a nifty animation of an eye closing, and we were all like, “Yeah, that makes sense, it’s called Sleepers, Tyler talks about sleep all the time, nothing new to see here.”

Then, a week later, Tyler (or somebody on the team, but let’s be real, it was Tyler) decided to destroy us.

Over the course of one day, all of TØP’s social media accounts changed their images every hour or so, in a series of pics that featured a red-filtered POV shot of a concert audience. Each image progressively shrunk in the manner of a closing eye, and each featured a different lyric related to sleep or saying goodbye mirrored across the crowd. Interestingly, the o’s in the final message were not crossed out, and instead the e’s have received horizontal slashes, perhaps indicating that the next era will feature the last part of the |-/ logo in its typography. Some people/publications freaked out, speculating it was a countdown to a new single or album, but it was pretty obvious that it was just one more nail in the coffin for the era, especially by the time it reached the above image. They’re done. They’re on hiatus. They’re not releasing music anytime soon. They’re just going to become a bunch of hermits.

...At least, until two weeks later, when Josh singlehandedly revived the fandom just as they had entered into their hiatus coma. Josh was invited to perform at the Alternative Press Music Awards, held this year in Cleveland instead of Columbus, but still not far from home at all (Tyler was likely on vacation and couldn’t attend, though the image of him staying at home with Jenna and his leaf blower rather than go to what I would argue is easily the worst awards ceremony in the music industry is really amusing). 

We’ll get to the performance in just a bit, but we first gotta address the fact that they won an award for Most Dedicated Fanbase. Josh (dressed in camo pants, a band t-shirt, and a baseball cap and yet still looking more professional than almost anyone else at the show), gave all the credit to the fans as expected, but also got in a couple of good jokes about how he is actually the most dedicated Twenty One Pilots fan. The most noticeable part of the speech, however, came at the beginning, when Josh explained Tyler’s absence by saying he was “cutting ties with DEMA [sic?]”.

As expected with the Clique, fan speculation immediately ran wild, and while the immediate reaction seemed to be that he was referencing some security agency that wasn’t properly doing its job, things quickly got out of hand when that son-of-a-gun Blurryface hopped back on his Twitter after months of silence (even through all of Tour de Columbus) to like a fan theory speculating that it was an esoteric reference to the eye-shaped Towers of Silence, old Zoroastrian structures (notably shaped kinda like eyes) on which the dead were left to be eaten by birds. That is awesome, intriguing, infuriating, and worrying at the same time. What’s going on in your head, Ty Jo? Are you just trolling? Are you outsourcing fans to give you cool ideas? What gives? Does any of this even count as news? Who cares, we’re all just flying through space on a speck, live a little.

One last bit of news: the new Goldfinger album The Knife, which features drumming from Jishwa on the song “Orthodontist Girl”, was released Saturday. It’s not really my jam, but if you’re into that sort of thing or just want to support Josh, it’s on Spotify/wherever else music is streamed or sold.

Performances, Interviews, and Other Shenanigans:

Anywho, Josh joined forces with two other amazing drummers (Adrian Young of No Doubt/DREAMCAR and Frank Zummo from Sum-41) to perform a drum medley of various pop and alternative hits. Despite (or perhaps because of) his much shorter time on the scene, Josh noticeably attracted much more noise from the teens in attendance. The performance featured everything from marching snares, audience members holding drums, exploding golf balls, pretty spotty audio mixing/camera work, Josh busting out a backflip, a pretty sick remix of “Ride”, and Josh playing “All Star” on the trumpet. It was pretty surreal.

Other than that, not much to report. Tyler has gone almost completely dark since the end of TDC, and even Josh hasn't been up to anything besides the APMAs and some occasional drum promotions. But there's still more to cover, if you can believe...

Chart Performance:

It's back! My old recurring segment's been kept mostly on the back-burner ever since "Heathens" left the Hot 100, but Billboard and the RIAA gave us a little more sales info about our band that I felt warranted coverage. First, some of the RIAA certifications for the band have been updated. “Message Man” has gone gold (500,000 approximate sold units), while “Holding On To You” and “House of Gold” have both gone platinum (one million). The big singles- in ascending order, “Ride”, “Heathens”, and “Stressed Out”- are now 4x, 5x, and 6x Platinum respectively. Nutty. Absolutely bonkers.

Next, after presumably six months of number crunching, those calculators over at Billboard released their list of the Top Money Makers of 2016. It's a pretty interesting read for any music fan, as the list includes a breakdown of the different revenue streams for each of its fifty featured artists, from how big a percentage of sales they receive in royalties to how massive their touring was in the given year. Our boys made the list for the first time ever, debuting at a whopping #13 and an estimated total of $21.1 (wtf) million. For context: that means that Tyler and Josh together made more money from their music in America in 2016 than Garth Brooks, Carrie Underwood, Future, Metallica, Maroon 5, and Elton John. 

However, like all Billboard rankings, this list contains tons of major caveats and weird arbitrary rules that makes it almost useless for actually assessing success. It doesn’t count sales in other regions, which is crazy for today’s global market and would totally reorder the list (for one, tons of the American country artists on this list would get booted out due to their negligible international sales and touring). It also doesn't cover other hugely significant revenue streams like merchandising, sponsorships, and other jobs like TV host or producer, which would likely put Twenty One Pilots quite a bit behind many of these guys for which the music is almost a secondary thing. Additionally, all of those artists have been making this kind of money much longer than our boys, and after taxes and other costs, most of that change probably isn't going directly into their bank accounts. Still, it's pretty safe to say that both Tyler and Josh are technically millionaires at this point, and it’s hard not to feel an immense sense of pride in the scale of their accomplishments. Now, I just genuinely hope they put those blessings to good use for charitable works.

A few more points from this list: The band was the top earner in 2016 in terms of publishing royalties due to their involvement with a major motion pictures soundtrack and the incredible radio support for three of their singles the whole year round. Additionally, they were the #3 most streamed artist/group of the year, just behind Drake and Kanye. They were also the biggest money-makers of any "new" group that had never previously been in this echelon of popular influence. For further context, the twelve artists that had better sales/touring years were, in ascending order, Rihanna, Billy Joel, Kenny Chesney, Kanye West, Luke Bryan, Justin Bieber, Coldplay, Adele, Drake, Bruce Springsteen, Guns and Roses, and Beyoncé- obviously, the boys are in very, very esteemed company. Finally, and perhaps surprisingly for those fans who consider Twenty One Pilots first-and-foremost a live band who are always playing shows, they were one of very few artists who did not make the majority of their money off of touring in 2016. This is not because they weren't touring their tushes off, but rather because a) they really did have an amazing sales year and b) despite what scalped ticket prices might tell you, the boys really did try to sell those tickets for much lower than what many fans were willing to pay for them. Most of the artists on this list were selling tickets up front at over $100 a pop; TØP was doing half that, and they were still up with the big boys. I'm a proud pop.

That's all for this week, folks. Not sure when I'll be back to chat again. Until then, and as always, power to the local dreamer.