Kanye West has yet to release The Life of Pablo for mass commercial release. However, a week after releasing the album to other streaming outlets besides TIDAL, The Life of Pablo is slated to reach the top of Billboard’s Top 200 albums chart when the official sales figures are released Monday (April 11).
According to HitsDailyDouble, the project is to rack in more than 90,000 album equivalent units mostly from streams from Spotify, Apple Music and TIDAL. The Life of Pablo digital download is available for purchase on West’s website, but the album’s streams are the majority of the figures. This will be the first album in history to reach the top spot off streams alone.
The site says that this marketing plan stemmed in part from West’s partnership with Justin Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun.
This will be West’s fifth #1 album. Yeezus, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, 808s and Heartbreak, Graduation and Late Registration all appeared at the top spot upon their respective releases.
West premiered The Life of Pablo at his Yeezy Season 3 fashion show in February. He then released it to TIDAL and said it would only be housed on the streaming service and would never be available anywhere else. The album reportedly doubled the number of TIDAL’s subscribers and was streamed 250 million times. Then last week, West released the album to the other streaming services and made it available for purchase on his website.
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what’s with this “based on streams” shit about? because somebody gave an album a listen that’s considered a f***ing sale? smmfh what happened to actual purchases? somebody’s got the game messed up
It basically comes down to this imo. When the ringtone rap blew up, execs and artists were like, damn, we can make some money off of this. And with “whole album” contracts and what have you, they were like, shoot, just throw in some wack tracks to act as fillers, we’ll get our moneys worth from the 2-3 ringtone singles (Flo-rida…I’m looking at you). So now because it’s so hard to have a full solid album, they switched it up to gain profit from their newly found needs. I think the terms ‘gold’ and ‘platinum’ or what have you should be used SOLELY on full album sales. The rap game is too oversaturated. Too many outlets. No longer streamlined. So now it’s singles, streams and all this other crap.
Well considering the fact that album sales are rapidly dropping (especially in hip hop) mostly because of streaming, I understand why they added the streaming numbers to the sales calculation (although I do not agree that streaming 1500 songs equals buying 1 album, since 1500 streams generate a lot less money than buying an actual record). Another option would have been that the RIAA decreases the numbers required for gold and platinum certifications, similar to what france did around 10 years ago (platinum used to be 300’000, now its down to 100’000, gold from 100’000 to 50’000 etc), although I wouldn’t consider this the optimal solution as streaming is getting more and more relevant. Without streaming, there would only be around 5 rap artists able to actually get an album certification in the first place.
smh…whtever happened to the first week sales
Wouldn’t it be his 6th number one album actually?
it aint Ralph doe
What a fucking joke !!!! Haven’t heard it won’t hear it his music is trash these days as I always said please stick to fashion Kanye do us all a favor he begs for attention as his hoe ass wife does stays in the family. Number one album off streams music industry is fucked. You haven’t fooled me.
Stick to fashion? You like your hobo wear??
Has to be the worst Kanye album by far.
I bet Kanye is proud…. this album would’ve sold 10k if it wasn’t for the streams. The Whole Music Game is going down the gutter, just watch.
Hahaha….didn’t all you guys already try this a month ago?!? Another horrible Kanye album, won’t sell, no one cares, garbage, blah blah blah
Then just one torrent site came out and said it was illegally downloaded 500k times…then Tidal released the streaming numbers…now Billboard says it’s the #1 album in the country.
10k seems like a good forecast for sales though. 6 platinum albums and one that sold 10k copies. We’re all fcked…The Whole Music Game is going down the gutter.
Pretty Good album better than Yeezus. Tracks like father stretch my hands pt.1 and feedback are dope
HOW SWAY
Congratualtions it just took you releasing your album like 5 times the dumbest media statements ever about how your not ever going to release it anywhere else then do blatently lying to your fans just to gain album sales and subscribers for your shitty ass streaming service so cool you brought in less sales than kendrick lamar or j cole and even dare i say TAYLOR SWIFT and they only release there albums once to get those numbers and dont have to devise a business tactic with the simplicity and stupditiy of a 5 year olds mind just to get sales
ALBUM OF DA YEAR!!!!