It was only three short years ago that Lizzo was such a successful pop star that she could play a string of arena dates around Australia, performing for tens of thousands of fans across multiple nights at Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena and Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena as part of her Special world tour.
Three years on, and Lizzo’s newly-released fifth studio album BITCH is heading for such a disastrous debut this week, the star has already gotten ahead of the news, publicly offering up reasoning as to why her career has so dramatically waned in popularity.
BITCH was released into the world last Friday, so we’ll have to wait until later this week to discover where it’s placed on the Aussie ARIA album charts (her last album debuted at number 2 here).
But early signs internationally are not good: In the UK, where her last album Special was a silver-selling #6 hit in 2022, the country’s early midweek chart shows BITCHlooks set to miss the top 100 entirely.
Other outlets have reported that in its first 24 hours of release, BITCH received just 633,914 streams worldwide on Spotify (that’s across all of its 12 tracks).
By contrast, Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department currently holds the record for most first-day Spotify streams, with 313 million.
“Lizzo not having a fanbase is so weird to me when this woman was literally selling out arenas not even 2 years ago,” one person mused on social media this week.
“Like, where did those people go?”
That question earned a response from the woman herself, who argued that she was a “radio darling” who had been hurt by the shift to streaming, as well as weathering an “attack” on her career.
“I actually can answer this: the industry changed so much in the last 3 yrs. Streaming replaced radio & I was a radio darling. That’s how my fans discovered my music. Not to mention the very obvious & public attack on my career changed things. But I’m out here doing my absolute best and u can’t knock a bitch for that,” she wrote.
Lizzo didn’t expand on what she meant by the attack on her career, but she was perhaps referring to the lawsuit she faced in 2023 by three former backup dancers, who alleged sexual, racial, and religious harassment, creating a hostile work environment, and fat-shaming.
The accusers dropped all fat-shaming allegations in December 2025, but the suit is still ongoing as Lizzo refuses to settle and has vowed to clear her name of the remaining allegations.
But not all were sold on Lizzo’s claim that she’s a victim of the streaming era, seeing as she broke through in the streaming era.
“‘Streaming has replaced radio’? You would think Lizzo debuted in the 90s,” one person tweeted.
“Streaming replaced radio over a decade ago. What are you talking about?” another asked.
“The shift to streaming happened about 12 years ago? The biggest most recent shift in the music industry is the focus on TikTok in the last few years, which is how Lizzo got most of her hits no?” another asked, pointing out that Lizzo’s biggest hits flew up the charts after gaining traction on the platform.
Reviews for BITCH have not been great: “Lizzo returns, but it doesn’t seem like her heart is in it,” wrote Rolling Stone in a two-and-a-half star review, bemoaning the album’s “tired moves and cynical appeals to the streaming algorithm.”
The Guardian gave the album two stars, writing that “Lizzo still sounds lost amid these weak genre-hopping songs” and wondering if “perhaps the zeitgeist has simply left her behind”?
Lizzo might have seemed like something of an overnight success when her single Truth Hurts became a surprise viral hit in 2019, but she’d had a long career before that, releasing her first album back in 2013. In fact, Truth Hurts was already two years old by the time it caught on in 2019 (and a huge follow-up hit, Good As Hell, had actually first been released in 2016).
The star’s last major worldwide hit was the 2022 single About Damn Time, a US number one that went on to win the coveted Record of the Year award at the 2023 Grammys.