The “Days Before Rodeo” rerelease is the rapper’s fourth title to reach the top.
Three weeks ago, a photo finish on the Billboard album chart saw Sabrina Carpenter edge out Travis Scott by a margin of less than a thousand copies. Now — after challenging those results — Scott has finally snagged No. 1, thanks to vinyl sales.
After opening at No. 2, Scott’s mixtape “Days Before Rodeo,” which came out in 2014 and was rereleased last month for its 10th anniversary, slipped down the Billboard 200 chart in successive weeks, falling all the way to No. 106 last week. Now it leaps to No. 1, becoming the Houston rapper’s fourth title to reach the top. It had the equivalent of 156,000 sales in the United States, 149,000 of them from shipments of vinyl LPs that fans had ordered on Scott’s website. After a month in wide release, the album’s streams were minimal, just eight million for the week.
But the victory was hard fought by Scott. After Billboard certified a victory for Carpenter, who had released her “Short n’ Sweet” on the same day as “Days Before Rodeo,” the rapper’s team revealed that they had sent a four-page letter in the days before the chart — which would credit Carpenter with 362,000 sales and Scott with 361,000, in rounded numbers — was finalized. The letter called the chart process “unreliable and incomplete.”
The letter also complained that Billboard and Luminate, its data partner, had not counted 1,291 copies sold in the final minutes of the tracking week; in such a tight race, those sales would have tipped the scales in Scott’s favor. Luminate defended the accuracy of its numbers, and the chart was not changed. Carpenter’s “Short n’ Sweet” held the top spot for three straight weeks and now falls to No. 2, with the equivalent of 108,000 sales.
Also this week, Chappell Roan’s “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” holds at No. 3, Post Malone’s “F-1 Trillion” is No. 4 and Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is No. 5.
Source: Music - nytimes.com
