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Zayn Malik: Poor Sales Are The Price Of Dissing One Direction And Their Fans

By Alan Ewart
Published on: 08:31 PST, Apr 2, 2016

Zayn Malik went straight to the top of the U.K. chart last night when the Official Chart Company released details of this week’s album sales. Malik’s debut offering Mind of Mine has for the most part been well received by the critics and Zayn is naturally proud that he should emulate his former band, One Direction, in debuting at the top spot. Zayn has certainly taken a different direction with his music. As he has said in the past, he feels that his current style allows him to be true to himself.

Malik is delighted to score a No. 1 hit, a feat that Zayn also achieved with his first solo single, “Pillowtalk.” According to the BBC, Malik describes his success as “mind-blowing.”

“I can’t believe that I have managed to achieve this as a solo artist. I am very proud coming from Bradford achieving this in my home country.

“It’s mind-blowing to me. I don’t take the support I have received for granted. My life at 23 could have been very different.”

Malik managed to knock Adele off the top of the chart. However, the fact that he tops this week’s chart hides an uncomfortable truth. A truth that suggests, contrary to his comment above, Malik has indeed taken his supporters for granted. Malik may have dumped Adele from the top of the chart but he did so by only 4,000 sales against an album that has spent 19 weeks in the top five and 12 weeks at No 1. According to the Sun, Zayn’s album chalked up a paltry 23,000 in sales in its first week. Figures they call “embarrassing.”

To put that figure into perspective, One Direction’s Made In The A.M. hit 93,000 first week U.K. sales, while Adele scored over 800,000. Whilst some outlets blame Zayn’s poor attitude toward promoting his album in the U.K., the reason may be much more simple than that.

One Direction fans are famously loyal to the boys and many stuck by Zayn when he walked out on the band just a few dates into their world tour. Make no mistake, though, for many One Direction fans the jury was still out on Malik. Fans were sympathetic when Malik flew home suffering from stress. However, a lot of eyebrows were raised when Malik was in the studio with his former friend Naughty Boy just three days later. Even then, most One Direction fans were tolerant and forgiving. The support One Direction fans showed Malik may have led him into a false sense of security, because as the release of his album came closer Zayn began to distance himself from One Direction. For many fans, Malik was guilty of disrespecting both them and One Direction.

Some may have some sympathy for Zayn, as he was giving interviews to talk about his new sound. However, it seems that every interviewer wanted to define Zayn in terms of One Direction. It was perhaps this constant association that led Malik to make a conscious effort to distance himself from One Direction and their music. If Malik was beyond his 23 years, he may have been able to handle this better; instead, Zayn made comments that a growing number of One Direction fans viewed as unforgivable.

All Malik had to do was tell interviewers that he loved his time with One Direction and that he was grateful to One Direction fans for the success they had brought him. After all, it was entirely due to One Direction that Malik managed to bank an estimated $40 million during his five years with them. Zayn’s advisors must have known the One Direction questions would come, and they must have prepared him and given him a script to follow.

Music lovers will probably never know whether Zayn chose not to follow the script or whether he was badly let down by his team. Either way, Zayn went on to make a number of very serious gaffs, not once but several times.

In November, Zayn told Fader that he never wanted to be in One Direction and that he had “wanted to go home from the start.” If that wasn’t enough, Zayn dismissed the way he quit One Direction in a way that goes beyond blasé.

“It just felt right on that day. I woke up on that morning and was like, ‘I need to go home. I just need to be me now, because I’ve had enough.’

“I was with my little cousin at the time — we were sat in the hotel room — and I just said, ‘Should I go home?’ And he was like, ‘If you want to go home, let’s go home.’ So we left.”

In the same interview, Malik also revealed that he would never listen to One Direction and claimed they were forced to re-record tracks until they were “as generic as f***.”

In January, Zayn followed up those comments by lashing out at his former bandmates in an interview with Billboard. On that occasion Malik intimated that the One Direction boys had rejected his attempts to reach out.

“I had every intention of remaining friends with everybody, but I guess certain phone numbers have changed and I haven’t received calls from a lot of people. I’ve reached out to a few of them and not got a reply. Certain people have pride issues, but it’s stuff you overcome in time.”

Malik is still a young man with much to learn. If Zayn is to forge a serious career as a solo artist, he needs to retain and develop his fanbase. Malik has lost over four million Twitter followers since he dissed One Direction. Malik is clearly a huge talent but he wants to develop in a way that’s vastly different from One Direction. All of that is fine, but Zayn needs to remember that his time with One Direction has given him the opportunity to do as he wishes for the rest of his life.

Malik should be proud of his time with One Direction, but above all Zayn should thank his lucky stars that so many One Direction fans have stuck by him. Malik’s poor U.K. sales show that One Direction’s fans can only be pushed so far. Something Zayn would do well to remember.

[Photo by John Salangsang/Invision/AP]

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