At the time, Billboard suggested that the album should be optional to the ticket-buyer and be priced as an add-on, not a freebie. Later that year, Billboard announced a new bundled-album rule: Any such offer had to give the consumer a way to opt into the album, an indication of intent to actually consume the disc. Prince successfully lobbied Billboard to count the giveaways for the album chart, but the magazine came to regret the decision when Musicology rode the Top 10 an unusually long time, despite not generating all that many traditional CD sales.
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A decade and a half ago, CDs of his album Musicology were given away free with tickets to his 2004 tour of the same name. How did the country’s flagship album chart turn into a playpen for merchandise tie-ins where the album is an afterthought?īundled album sales are essentially a 21st-century phenomenon - and the late Prince was both the inventor of the gimmick and the first to earn industry scorn for it.
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Hang on … you may be asking: The Billboard 200 is an album chart how does the purchase of an energy drink count? Complicating matters further, Tyler managed to take the chart’s top slot by also tying an Igor download to the purchase of merch - everything from T-shirts and stickers to lawn signs. The charge? Billboard reportedly disallowed from the chart some 100,000 merchandise or “merch” bundles Khaled sold the week his album dropped, connecting a Father of Asahd download to the purchase of a Khaled-branded energy drink. Two weeks after Billboard gave the week’s title to Tyler’s Igor over Khaled’s Father of Asahd, Khaled is rumored to be planning a lawsuit against the magazine on the premise that he was robbed of a No. 1 album.
Especially after Khaled performed on the season finale of Saturday Night Live, accompanied by a skybox’s worth of rap luminaries, he wasn’t going down without a fight. The smart money was that Billboard was refereeing a fight between the two acts battling for that week’s No. 1, each from a different corner of hip-hop: quirky former Odd Future member Tyler, the Creator, and relentlessly self-promotional emcee DJ Khaled. Photo: Kevin Mazur/KCA2019/Getty Images for NickelodeonĬhart-watchers noticed in late May when music-business bible Billboard took four extra days to make their album chart, the Billboard 200, official for the week. Khaled is an imperfect messenger delivering a valid message.
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