When is 100,000 album sales in a single week considered a failure? When you're pop star named Halsey, and your record label is measuring marketing performance metrics against your biggest hit instead of industry reality.

In a raw interview with Apple Music's Zane Lowe, Halsey revealed something most marketers feel but rarely say out loud: "I can't make an album right now—I'm not allowed to. That's the reality, because The Great Impersonator didn't perform the way they thought it was going to."

Her album sold over 100,000 copies in its first week, debuted at #2 on the Billboard 200, and led to the highest-grossing tour of her career. Yet her label blocked her from recording new music because those numbers didn't match her 2020 album Manic, which moved 239,000 units opening week.

If you're running social media, managing campaigns, or leading a marketing team, Halsey's story isn't just music industry drama: it's your reality. And it's a crucial lesson in how we define and measure marketing performance metrics that actually matter.

The Tyranny of Your Own Success

Here's what happens when marketing performance metrics become disconnected from reality: a campaign that exceeds industry benchmarks, generates qualified leads, and accomplishes strategic objectives gets labeled "underperforming" because it didn't beat last quarter's viral moment.

I've watched this play out countless times. A post could spark genuine conversation, drive meaningful engagement with the target audience, and hit every goal we set for it. But if it didn't match the reach of that one viral post? Suddenly, it's a disappointment.

Want to know how absurd this gets? The median engagement rate across all industries on Facebook is 0.063%, not even a tenth of a percent. On Instagram, it's 0.70%. TikTok is dropping too, with engagement rates falling by about 50% this year. Yet marketers everywhere are getting side-eyed for not matching their one viral post that hit 12% engagement—an outlier so rare it might as well be a unicorn.

Halsey put it perfectly: "What would be considered a success for most artists, a success story, 100,000 albums in the first week, in an era when we don't sell physical music, okay, with no radio hit, nothing. But it's a failure... in the context of the kind of success that I've had previously."

Sound familiar? You're not being measured against what's possible, what's strategic, or what's valuable. You're being measured against your own outliers.

Why Performance Metrics Need Context, Not Just Numbers

The problem isn't that we track numbers, it's that we worship them without context.

Between 2001 and 2010, physical music sales declined by more than 60%, wiping out $14 billion in annual revenue. When Halsey's label demands Manic numbers from an experimental concept album about nearly dying, they're ignoring that physical album sales haven't registered a year-on-year increase since 2004.

When evaluating marketing performance metrics, we need to ask better questions:

What was the goal? If your objective was brand awareness in a new market segment, comparing engagement rates to a campaign targeting loyal customers is useless. The Great Impersonator was an experimental concept album about chronic illness—not a radio-friendly pop record designed for mass appeal. Different goals require different metrics.
What's actually realistic? Manic featured "Without Me," a 6x platinum hit that dominated charts during an era when she was "fighting for #1" with Ariana Grande. That's not a benchmark—that's an anomaly you got lucky with once. In marketing, your viral TikTok that got 5 million views isn't your new baseline. It's lightning in a bottle.
What's changed in the landscape? As Halsey noted, she sold 100,000 albums "in an era when we don't sell physical music" with "no radio hit, nothing." The market shifted—and dramatically. If you're holding 2025 social media performance to 2019 standards when organic reach was completely different, your metrics are measuring nostalgia, not reality.
What else has value? Halsey's tour was the highest-grossing of her career. But that didn't matter to the label fixated on first-week album sales. In marketing, we do this constantly: obsessing over vanity metrics while ignoring customer lifetime value, brand sentiment, or strategic positioning gains. Strong metrics capture the full picture, not just the easiest number to track.

The Multi-Dimensional Reality of Marketing Performance

If there's one thing Halsey's story illustrates, it's this: marketing performance metrics are multi-dimensional, and flattening them into a single comparison point is dangerous.

Consider what "performance" actually meant for The Great Impersonator:

100,000 first-week sales in a streaming-dominant era
#2 debut on Billboard 200
Record-breaking tour revenue
Deep connection with fans around serious health struggles
Critical acclaim for artistic risk-taking

But because it didn't hit one specific number, the entire project got labeled a failure. The label focused on one metric and ignored everything else.

This happens in marketing all the time. A LinkedIn post with 500 engaged comments from decision-makers in your target market gets dismissed because it only had 5,000 impressions instead of 50,000. Never mind that LinkedIn's average engagement rate among brands is 4.73% and your post crushed that. A nurture email with a 45% open rate and 8% conversion rate gets criticized because last month's promotional blast hit 60% opens (never mind that almost nobody converted).

We need metrics that reflect what we're actually trying to achieve—not just what's easy to measure or what we did last time.

Setting Benchmarks That Aren’t Delusional

You need benchmarks grounded in reality, not fantasy. Start with industry standards, not your peak performance. TikTok's average engagement rate is 2.65%, Instagram is 0.70%, and Facebook is barely scraping 0.063%. If you're hitting 4% on any platform, you're genuinely crushing it—even if you once had a post hit 12%. Use your wins to inform strategy, not to create impossible metrics that make everything else look like failure.

Separate different content types and goals. Don't measure thought leadership content against product announcements or compare cold audience campaigns to retargeting. Document what success looks like before you launch. This prevents moving goalposts and gives you a defense when someone inevitably compares it to something completely different. Clear metrics established upfront protect both the work and the team.

Build in room for learning, not just winning. Some campaigns are about testing or building foundation for future work. If your metrics only reward immediate wins, you'll never innovate.

Celebrating Small Wins in a Viral World

Halsey said something that should be carved into every marketer's desk: "They want Manic numbers from me. Everyone wants Manic numbers from me. I can't do that every single time. It should be good enough that I do it once in a while."

Going viral is great. Breaking your own records feels amazing. But if those become the only metrics that count, you'll never be satisfied—and more importantly, you'll miss the value in everything else you're building.

The post that gets 1,000 impressions but leads to three qualified sales calls? That's a win. The campaign that didn't go viral but shifted brand perception in your target market? That's a win. The content that builds trust with your audience, even though it didn't trend? That's a win, too.

Small wins build over time. Consistency builds trust. And sometimes the most valuable metrics are the ones that don't scream for attention.

Recognize Value Beyond the Dashboard

Here's what doesn't show up in most dashboards:

The prospect who finally understood your value proposition
The customer who felt seen by your brand voice
The industry conversation you shifted
The team member who learned something that will pay off in six months
The creative risk that didn't work but taught you something crucial

The Great Impersonator connected with fans on a deeper level than her pop hits ever could. It told her story during the hardest period of her life. But because those things don't translate directly to first-week sales numbers, they didn't matter to the label.

Don't let your organization make the same mistake. Numbers matter, but they're not the only thing that matters. And if you can't measure it on a dashboard, that doesn't mean it has no value—it just means you need to get better at telling the story.

The Real Performance Metric: Lasting Impact

Halsey's interview went viral. Not because she was celebrating a hit, but because she articulated something every creator and marketer feels: the exhausting pressure of being measured against your own outliers while the rest of the industry is struggling with the same declining metrics.

The overall US recorded music market's revenues grew by just 3.3% in 2024, and on a wholesale basis it was only 2.7%—lower than inflation. Social media isn't much better. Engagement rates are falling across nearly every platform. Everyone's dealing with this.

Going viral is nice. Crushing your numbers feels great. But lasting impact comes from consistency, authentic connection, and clear purpose. It comes from understanding that marketing performance metrics should measure progress, not perfection. It comes from building something sustainable instead of constantly chasing the next hit that you can't predict and probably can't replicate.

As Halsey put it: "I love them, God bless them, because they're the only reason that I'm even able to make anything at all." She wasn't talking about the ones who only showed up for "Without Me." She was talking about the ones who stayed and valued the work beyond a single number.

That's what we should be measuring. Not just the biggest wins, but the relationships we build, the trust we earn, and the value we create over time. Those are the metrics that actually predict long-term success.

At the end of the day, 100,000 albums in a week is objectively a success story—unless you've spent years training everyone around you to see anything less than your peak as failure. Don't do that to yourself. Don't do that to your team. And definitely don't let some executive who doesn't understand the landscape do it to you either.

Your Best Work Is Called a Failure: Why Marketing Performance Metrics Are Broken