Pretty much everyone that has a radio or an internet connection has heard of the band, One Direction. The band is based out of London and was one of the stars of the X Factor. The band had signed with Simon Cowell’s record label after finishing in third place back in 2010. The band can thank social media for tossing it into stardom and the fact that the first four albums from the band broke sales records.
Just like any band that is just starting out, they went straight to the top and one plenty of positive reviews and awards as well. Just for the Teen Choice Awards alone, the band was nominated 19 times and won in every single category which is not something you see every day. In 2012 the band was added to the Top New Artist group by Billboard. The group earned a whopping $75 million from June 2013 to June 2014 making them the second richest group under the age of 30 in the United Kingdom.
Even though everything seems to be going good with the band and all of the fans are happy with the songs that it turns out, there is something going on that caused the departure of one band member recently. Zayn Malik, announced that he was leaving the band last week and rumors started to fly that he could be looking to start his own solo career. You can imagine that this news was not easy for fans to take, assuming the band would break up after all of this.
That is not the case, in fact, the band is ready to record another album without Zayn Malik. In some places, Zayn Malik leaving One Direction was such bad news that companies were taking calls from employees that were requesting “compassionate leave” from work. According to one law firm, they received almost 500 phone calls from companies that wanted to know how to handle those that did call in for that reason.
As many would expect, the companies that were asking, were given the advice that they should deny any request for such thing, unless the employee is a direct relative to Zayn Malik. Fans took to Twitter to voice their displeasure with the news and to ask other Twitter fans if him leaving the band was good enough reason to skip work, or to leave early. While most took that as a joke, the phone calls to the law firm were quite real and serious.