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DJ Khaled could sue Billboard over chart position
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 11 June 2019
DJ Khaled could sue the makers of the Billboard music charts in a dispute over album/merch bundling. Because, well, why not?
The bundling of new records with tickets or other products has become increasingly common, of course. There has been much debate over whether it’s entirely fair to count all the bundle sales in any chart counting, especially if it feels like the music is actually the smaller part of the overall bundle. Nicki Minaj has been particularly vocal on the issue.
Still, the bundling still goes on and usually those sales are counted by the Billboard chart counters in the US. However, it seems that when Khaled bundled his new album ‘Father Of Asahd’ with some energy drinks, not all the bundle sales were included in Billboard’s number crunching.
That, the DJ/producer reckons, meant his album went into the chart at number two behind Tyler, The Creator’s ‘Igor’, which had all of its bundle sales included in the final tally.
According to gossip site Page Six, Billboard chart chiefs initially said that they would count all the energy drink bundles but then changed their mind because of “anomalies” in the data that subsequently came in from the online promotion.
Khaled’s people reckon that decision lost him 100,000 sales in the final chart count and with it the number one spot. A Billboard source has confirmed that the energy drink bundle sales weren’t counted, but then denied that the impact was quite so significant.
Either way, Page Six says that, having shouted at Sony label Epic for not doing enough to beat up Billboard over its bundle sales decision, Team Khaled have now got their lawyers to send a stern letter to the industry trade mag’s SVP of charts Silvio Pietroluongo.
So that’s all fun. Billboard has already been reviewing its policies on what to do with album bundles when calculating its music charts. Maybe everyone could just agree that no one outside the record industry cares about the charts anymore so it doesn’t really matter.
