Happy Dummy by Portugal, the Man Release Day

 

     Dummy is the new single from Portugal, the Man, from their forthcoming record.  One of my boo's clients worked on this song- he is credited as writer and producer on the track and since boo works out of the home I overheard approximately one million calls and zooms on the subject of this song. It involved every trope about major label/artist relations that you could possibly imagine, and then some, but it wouldn't be my place to discuss that kind of back-stage stuff, except to say that if Dummy, the new single by Portugal, the Man did not satisfy every single criterion that Atlantic Records has for being a stone cold smash, it would not be getting released today.

   I would like to add a few words about hits- which, if you know any artist worth their salt, are despised and looked down upon.  First of all, if you look back at the history of recorded music, the single is more prevalent than the album- the album as a separate form of music really doesn't take over until after the Beatles started taking acid.  Before that you would have albums but they would essentially be collections of singles.  So, the single has always been important, and this goes back to BEFORE recorded music, when sales were expressed in terms of sheet music and player piano scores sold.

   Second, within the album era, 10 percent of releases pay for the other 90 percent, and within that 10 percent, I would argue that over half of the revenue- usually much more- is provided by whatever SONG on a specific album is the hit.  The measure of a truly succesful album is whether it has more than one hit.  The idea that an album might succeed holistically without hits is a bit of fantasy, since much of the grist for that particular mill comes from the example of late 60's and 70's hard rock artists (a la Led Zeppelin) sold many ALBUMS without a RADIO hit- but those albums still had obvious classic hits, they just weren't on FM radio at the time (spoiler alert, they are today!)

    So Portugal, the Man- whatever their artistic merits or demerits- have one hit- that hit is Feel It Still, and it has over a billion streams and I think it is perfectly fair to say that it has paid for everything since in that particular universe.  That song was released on March 3rd of 2017, which means it has been almost exactly six years. Six years they have been waiting for this song.  And it has arrived.