RIHANNA’S long-awaited new album ANTi finally dropped last week following one of the most protracted publicity campaigns in recent memory.
More than three long years after her last album release, the Barbadian singer’s eighth long-player was mistakenly uploaded to streaming service Tidal, then hastily removed — before being officially made available just hours later to combat illegal fan downloads of the initial leak.
It was a slapdash release for such an anticipated album, and it appears to have cost Rihanna a lot of early sales.
Tidal, the deluxe streaming service owned by Jay-Z, reported more than one million sales for ANTi in its first few days of release.
The only catch? The album was offered for free for a limited time with use of a special code, so the vast majority of those ‘sales’ were actually free downloads.
Rihanna’s corporate sponsor Samsung actually bought the one million copies, passing them on for free to listeners.
Combine that with the dominance of streaming in today’s market, and we see a very different picture of the album’s early success.
Billboard reports that ANTi debuted at number 27 in the US after its first few days of sale. The chart body, which does not appear to count Tidal’s free download offer in its calculations, reports that while ANTi clocked up four million streams, it reportedly registered under 1000 actual sales - just 460, to be precise. Yep, that’s four-six-zero, in a country of 321 million people.
But while the truth is a long way away from Tidal’s trumpeted ‘one million sales’, it’s too early to call ANTi a flop: it’s expected to chart highly in the UK and Australia this week — based on sales alone, not free downloads — and will be available for physical release in stores this Friday, further boosting its sales.
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