Music

Nobody knows if Rihanna sold one million or 460 copies of her album

by Richard Howard

The whole lead up to the release of Rihanna’s new album Anti has been really, really weird.

Beginning as early as January 2015, she dropped three singles, cinematic ads featuring her music, and an interactive website which allowed you to creep her bedroom for clues about the upcoming album.

Then, just days before its official release last week, Jay Z’s TIDAL streaming service made a whoopsie and briefly leaked the entire album.

Amazingly, none of that has turned out to be the weirdest part of the story. That’s taking place now: Anti has been certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) – yet one music scanning service pegged her week-end sales at well under 1,000.

Confusing, right? Here’s the long and short of it – basically, nobody knows what the hell is going on. But in the interest of brevity, we’ll try to summarize and make a few assumptions.

First, let’s look at the lowballers. That title goes to Nielsen Soundscan, the well-known music sales tracking service. According to them, Anti sold less than 1,000 copies last week. The New York Times went even further, citing a source within the service that claimed the number was actually 460 copies.

OK – obviously we can call bullshit on that one. Regardless of foreign vs. U.S. sales, cutoff times for weekly counts and other technicalities, it’s pretty certain Rihanna didn’t sell less copies of her album (even in only a single day) than the number of cookies an enterprising girl scout could conceivably move in the same time.

At the same time, if this instant platinum business smells a lot like a cattle farm to you (bullshit, is what we’re sayin’), your nose is probably right. The main source of that pungent scent would be Rihanna’s partnership with Samsung which saw the tech giant purchase one million copies of Anti and offer them to users as free downloads – the same deal her mentor Jay Z struck up with the company in 2013.

And like Jay’s album Magna Carta Holy Grail, the RIAA has decided they’re totes cool with that type of ‘sales,’ so according to them, Anti is a platinum smash. Why don’t you just rename yourselves RIAAnna, ya suck ups?

And then there are the numbers courtesy of TIDAL and Billboard. TIDAL, of course, insists that the album is a smash hit and was downloaded 1.47 million times in about 15 hours. That’s totally gangsta – but includes downloads outside of the U.S., and presumably includes the one million free Samsung downloads.

So, realistically, the album was downloaded a few hundred thousand times worldwide, with some fraction of that being U.S. downloads. Anti also debuted at #27 on the Billboard chart. Not bad, but not stellar – remembering that Billboard’s new rules factor streaming into sales as well (1,500 streams = 1 album purchase, 100-150 streams = 1 song download).

So is Anti a surefire flop? God, no. As TIDAL was quick to point out, the album had barely a day of activity before chart position and sales numbers were tallied. It seems it’s less a reflection of the album itself and more one of the massive cock-ups by TIDAL and her label Universal.

It’s a good bet the album will perform strongly in the coming week – but considering the past 12 months, wagering on something else weird as hell going down wouldn’t be a bad call either.