Rihanna’s highly anticipated album, Anti, did not top the Billboard album charts as expected, but it still managed to earn a platinum certification from the Recording Industry Association of America.
The album earned a platinum rating after Tidal — Jay Z’s streaming music service that partnered with Rihanna — teamed up with Samsung to give one million downloads of the album away to fans. Billboard‘s policies do not count promotional giveaways of albums and therefore the one million downloads given out did not help Rihanna climb the blockbuster album chart.
Nielsen’s report notes that Anti has sold less than 1,000 units, with one Tidal subscriber telling The New York Times that only 460 albums have been purchased. Further Nielsen data shows that Anti did have 4.2 million streams and 126,000 sales of singles off the album. This puts her at No. 27 for the album’s first week on the Billboard 200.
A spokesperson for Tidal told the Times that the reason Anti didn’t top the charts this week was because it was released late Thursday after the Samsung giveaway ended. The accounting week ends midnight on Thursday, which didn’t leave much time to rack up sales.
Rihanna was able to land the No. 1 spot on iTune’s internal charts and is expected to climb the charts in the coming weeks.
However, this is still her worst opening week on Billboard‘s album chart. Her 2012 album Unapologetic opened at No. 1 and all seven of her earlier albums were noted in the top 10.
Can Rihanna’s Anti knock Adele’s 25 out of the No. 1 spot next week? More importantly, would this affect Adele’s dream to have Rihanna in her squad?
