1 album was 2012’s Fortune, and it’s clear he’d like another. (That thinking might also be why Billboard has announced plans to more fairly measure the value of streams.)Ī post shared by ??? ? on at 5:03am PDTĬhris Brown’s last No. A sale is apparently all Brown cares about. To “buy multiple copies” but also don’t purchase them all on one receipt because his team believes it will only count as a single sale.
Pleading a step further, Brown requests that those suckers who do buy the album “be extra” about it. “Stream multiple times and leave the album on repeat,” his team writes.
#CHRIS BROWN RUN IT ALBUM TRIAL#
His Instragram has encouraged fans to sign up for Spotify’s free tier and take advantage of Apple Music and Tidal’s trial periods for his benefit (and cancel it later on, if you choose). (Brown appears to have badly misunderstood Billboard’s chart cycle week, which tracks sales Friday through Thursday.) which He’s commanded fans not to listen to the album on iTunes, but stream the hell out of it elsewhere. With this à la carte steaming plan in mind, Brown has opted for a digital release first - in the middle of the chart-tracking week, no less - with a physical copy to follow on Friday. It’s possible that without these streaming metrics, these albums would have been this long, but at 45 tracks, Brown’s album is the most glaring exploitation of the new system yet. Chris Brown isn’t alone in crowding his album even just this month: Ty Dolla $ign’s Beach House 3 spans 20, and BIG K.R.I.T.’s 4eva Is a Mighty Long Time is 22. Drake’s More Life got up to 22 tracks, while even Zayn’s debut had 18.
Record labels have pounced on the loophole: It’s common practice, particularly in rap and R&B (two of the most-streamed genres that also have a long history of long albums), for a track listing to run long.
#CHRIS BROWN RUN IT ALBUM FULL#
It, too, now counts 1,500 streams as a full album sale when the rule change went into effect, dozens of albums instantly got their plaques. (That’s especially true if it includes a previously high-streamed single, as was thought to be the sly reason Drake stuck “Hotline Bling” on the end of his 20-song album Views, which broke streaming records.) The RIAA, which awards gold and platinum designations to high-selling albums, adapted the same rules last year. Under those new guidelines, mathematically, an album containing more songs has a better chance of “selling” based on streams. Now, ten downloads equal one album sale, and 1,500 song streams from an album also count for one album sale, even if they come from a streaming service’s free tier. In 2014, Billboard began counting streaming and downloads toward its album chart, introducing new music currency like the “track equivalent album” (TEA) and “streaming equivalent album” (SEA) to the business. Overstuffing albums has become a trick of the music-industry trade in recent years, ever since streaming started driving chart numbers. The day before its release, he instructed his fans how best to stream some of it so that he can be rewarded for their minimal effort. But it’s possible that Brown did not mastermind this double album (his eighth) - or its stunt-marketing strategy - with the intent for anyone to listen to it all in one sitting. Hell, you could even listen to two other albums in the time it would take to finish Brown’s Heartbreak on a Full Moon front to back. You could watch Titanic up until just before Jack dies. You could stream a few episodes of Stranger Things 2 in that time. But at 45 songs, clocking in at over two-and-a-half hours, it’s a big ask. Chris Brown is begging you to stream his new album.