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Epic Records have managed to engineer a hit album in the US by playing the system - despite the fact that no-one has technically bought it.
As The New York Times reports, the album - which was hastily thrown together with some incredibly lazy cover art - isn’t even available to buy, and yet has somehow landed in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 four times.
How? Because since late 2014, Billboard has counted 1,500 streams or 10 paid downloads of a song as the equivalent of one album sold - providing that song comes from an album, that is. Noticing that their artists’ most popular songs were going to waste, because they weren’t yet attached to an album, Epic Records decided to collect all those songs into one compilation album.
As such, the likes of ‘Pick Up The Phone’ by Travis Scott, ‘Don’t Mind’ by Kent Jones and ‘Lockjaw’ by French Montana are now a part of an ‘album’ called Epic AF.
Dave Bakula, senior analyst for Nielsen Music, told The New York Times that the tactic was a way of “trying to manipulate the charts”, though he added, “But if they’re living within the rules, good for them in being creative and having enough of a stable of big-name artists and big songs.”
Providing Billboard doesn’t change its rules again, there will probably be many more to follow.
