Jay-Z’s New Album Goes Platinum

Look at Jay-Z, so un-phased by this. Love it

 

...how

 

???

 

I don't understand how

 

Lots of streaming I guess?. Also, sprint bought a bunch of albums and gave them out as free downloads with a code.

 

HITS Daily Double : Rumor Mill - JAY-Z SPRINTS TO PLATINUM

 

Highly doubt it, that would be like 1.5 billion streams

 

seems like no streams were counted, just the downloads that Sprint bought. wonder how much money he's lost in order to get his latest two albums to platinum status

 

This is dumb

 

I don't even understand Sprint's play with this. I literally just downloaded the album for free from Tidal by using the promo code Sprint, but I do not have Sprint as a carrier and nothing about this will sway me to getting Sprint or Tidal as a service.

 

Lost money? He probably made a bunch of money from this deal.

 

Yeah, I'm not sure how he could be losing money here. No way his album goes platinum if Sprint doesn't make him this deal.

 

I'm guessing that the ones that downloaded the album, counted. I think (correct me if I'm wrong) if Sprint bought 5 million download codes and 1 million used a code to download, only those million would count. I'm going to guess the automatic downloads (Magna Carta and that u2 album) would automatically count to that total since Magna also went platinum in a day.

 

This is impossibly lame. I don't blame Jay for taking the deal, because who wouldn't, but if he goes around touting it as a platinum record all the time it's just going to look so bad.

 

Looking back, did he tout Magna Carta as a platinum record? I think he's usually pretty general about his accomplishments (saying platinum records instead of a certain album going platinum).

 

This happens everytime an album is released by a company like sprint. They give it out to all of their customers for free so for charting purposes it shows they bought the record that many times.

 

It does bring up an interesting point of discussion: where, in a perfect world, would the line be drawn between a sale and a giveaway?

For instance, New Found Glory gave away a copy of Makes Me Sick with all tickets for their 20 Year tour, and I think are even still doing so for their current/future legs. That feels much more legitimate to me and is a genius way to add a few more dollars to a ticket fee which probably add up to much more than they'd make off the casual fan's streaming habits.

 

If they wanted I think they can claim those as sales. Streaming makes this stuff weird. Sort of how Fast and Furious 6(?) kept on getting the number 1 album based almost solely of the amount streaming the single was getting.

 

I wish this wasn't on Apple Music...

 

I think if Spring bought 5 million then it would go on as 5x platinum, because then those are technically sold. But, I'm not 100% on that

 

It may be different but I know for the Metallica Worldwired tour every ticket came with a copy of the album but it only counted as a chart sale if the codes were actually redeemed. This might be the same or different though.

 

Well this has to be similar to what a regular music store does right? If the label sends Best Buy a million copies to all of their stores but Best Buy only sells 100k copies, then the album only sold 100k copies. If Sprint received 5 million codes but only 1 million were redeemed, it would only be a million sold. It sounds logical but I'm not sure if that's how it truly works.

 

Yeah that's true, hm. I always just assumed Best Buy and other retailers were given the albums, not that they paid for them -- which might be the difference here if that's true?

You both bring up interesting points and I honestly don't know how it works, but I'd be interested if we found out.

 

RIAA's count towards Platinum/Gold records uses distributors to judge its success, not indiviudal consumers. So if Sprint bought a million copies that's considered platinum. However Billboard does it different and does chart albums by their actual sales to individuals. Sprint's copies of the album won't count towards that, similar to MCHG and Rihanna's ANTI.