NEW YORK — Four years after topping the Billboard 200, Lizzo released an album this month that the chart did not so much reject as fail to notice.
“Bitch,” her fifth studio album, sold an estimated 2,650 copies in its opening week, according to Forbes’s tracking of Luminate sales data, a number small enough to keep the record off the Billboard 200 altogether. It landed only on the far narrower Top Album Sales chart, debuting at No. 46, the lowest placement of Lizzo’s career on any Billboard ranking.
The contrast with her last album is not subtle. “Special” opened at No. 2 in 2022 on 39,000 copies sold and 69,000 equivalent units, then climbed to No. 1 later that year. “Bitch” did not chart at all, making it the first traditional Lizzo album to miss the Billboard 200 in more than five years. By its second week, sales had fallen to roughly 650 units and streaming had dropped under 900,000 plays.
Lizzo built the album’s entire premise around reclaiming the word in its title as a statement of self-possession. The industry did not argue with that framing. It simply did not show up for it, and the gap between the two says more than any single review could.
The release also arrives with a legal cloud that has not lifted. Three former backup dancers and a tour manager sued Lizzo in Los Angeles Superior Court in August 2023, alleging sexual harassment, a hostile work environment, and weight and religious discrimination, with claims centered partly on a 2023 outing to a nude cabaret club in Amsterdam that the dancers said they were pressured to attend. NBC News reported on the dancers’ allegations when the suit was filed. A judge dismissed the fat-shaming claim in December, but let the harassment and discrimination counts proceed toward a jury trial, and Lizzo said in May she has no intention of settling. It is not the only litigation trailing her; a separate discrimination suit from a former tour stylist was still working through the courts as recently as late 2023.
Industry accounts of the collapse do not converge on one cause, and that lack of consensus is itself worth noting. Some point to a streaming ecosystem that rewards constant single releases over full albums from artists who step away for years at a time. Others point to a media cycle that spent more time on courtroom filings than on the music itself. Neither explanation is presented by the outlets covering it as the definitive one, and no named chart analyst has offered a clean percentage breakdown of how much of the collapse belongs to the lawsuit, how much to shifting algorithms, and how much to the music landing on ears that had simply moved on.
What happens next is not settled either. Nothing in the available reporting says whether her label will treat the numbers as a one-album stumble or a reason to rethink how it releases her next project, and the harassment case itself is still headed for a jury rather than a settlement, which means the story around this album is not finished even if its chart run already is.
Lizzo spent four years building a comeback around a single word, turned inward and reclaimed. The industry’s answer arrived not as an argument but as a silence, and silence is the one review no publicist can spin.
