Looks like Epic records has a hit album on their hands – Epic AF. Heard of it?
Epic has collected its artists’ most popular summer singles that were not released with an album — “Lockjaw” by French Montana and Kodak Black, “Don’t Mind” by Kent Jones, “Pick Up the Phone” by Travis Scott and Young Thug — and placed them into one digital playlist, giving it a hip title and some generic cover art. In 2016, that’s enough to call it an album.
Why you ask?
Since late 2014, Billboard has counted 1,500 streams or 10 paid downloads of a song as the equivalent of one album sold. But if a hit single comes from an album that is unreleased, the millions of plays it tallies on services like Spotify, Tidal and Apple Music go nowhere.
Now, with this new album, when Billboard counts the weekly plays for hits like “Don’t Mind,” which has 139 million Spotify streams to date, they are attached to the album. With an album, this gives way for marketing and branding opportunities that may have never existed.
Dave Bakula, a senior analyst for Nielsen Music, which supplies the data Billboard uses for its charts, said that some could see the tactic as “trying to manipulate the charts.” 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,” he said.
Billboard has not commented on Epic’s methods. But this week, the chart company opted to change its rules slightly so that paid downloads of singles included on this album do not count toward its chart position but streaming numbers do.
Still, the system is flexible.
Take the current hits from DJ Khaled (“For Free,” “I Got the Keys”) as examples. Before the release of DJ Khaled’s own album “Major Key” on July 29, the streams for those songs were going toward the compilation album. This week, however, they were counted toward “Major Key,” which hit No. 1. (As a result of losing those streams and all song sales, the compilation album dropped to No. 32 from No. 5, having accomplished its goal as a placeholder hit.)
“It did what it was supposed to do,” said Celine Joshua, a senior vice president for commerce at Epic and its parent company, Sony Music Entertainment, who oversaw the project.
“It was born out of a need and a problem,” she said. “I was thinking about our hot roster and the cycles of which content was coming out when, albums that were around the corner and how young fans on these platforms are behaving — consuming in the playlist manner.”
source: nytimes
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