Music

'Watch the Throne' sees no apparent sales increase after it successfully avoids pre-release leak

by Tyler Munro

The fine folks over at Grantland decided to take a look at how Watch the Throne‘s sales benefited from its anti-leak push. As it turns out, not at all. Using Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Jay-Z’s Blueprint 3 (both of which leaked about two weeks before their respective releases) as their sales barometer, Watch the Throne compared almost number-for-number.

In fact, Watch the Throne actually sold less in its first week than both My Dark Twisted Fantasy (496,000) and Blueprint 3 (476,000), selling an otherwise respectable (if not incredible) 436,000 copies in its first seven days (that number includes both digital and physical releases). That being said, they still sold enough on iTunes to break Coldplay’s record. Take that, Gwyneth Paltrow.

As for how the two biggest rappers on the planet (economically, we’re not talking fatties here) avoided a leak, Grantland points out that they used some pretty intense security measures (biometric thingy-ma-jig fingerprint scanners) and recorded it in non-traditional studios in hotels and bathrooms. Okay, probably not bathrooms.