The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week in the US based on multi-metric consumption, which includes traditional album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA).
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Bowie is credited on Blonde, alongside other big names including Kanye West, Jamie xx, the Beatles, Brian Eno, Pharrell Williams, Elliott Smith, James Blake, Yung Lean, Tyler, The Creator and former Vampire Weekend member Rostam Batmanglij. Ocean’s album “Blonde” has already stacked up an impressive 750,000 illegal downloads in less than a week since it’s exclusive release through Apple Music.
FRANK Ocean’s long-awaited album Blonde opened at number one on the Australian, US and United Kingdom charts this week, in one of the year’s biggest debuts after the artist thumbed his nose at his label.
The one-day window between “Endless” and “Blonde” would likely be UMG’s foremost point of legal contention with Ocean.
Fader also reported on same Tuesday August 23, 2016 that Frank Ocean released the “Blonde” album under his purported independent label Boys Don’t Cry.
Universal Music has reportedly declared the end of albums released exclusively on a single music streaming service, after an unexpected double release from artist Frank Ocean last week left it potentially out of pocket. Many recording contracts also specify a window of time during which artists can not release music on another label.
Nonetheless, Ocean’s controversial move has certainly made waves in the industry and brought more scrutiny to the concept of streaming exclusives for artists. (Spotify didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment). He then posted a weird live video that saw him chopping wood for hours on end, teasing the fact new music was coming. Deals such as these are seen as examples of digital services interfering in labels’ relationships with artists. Much of the album’s first-week sales figures will have been generated through its streaming numbers, which have become an increasingly dominant factor in tracking album sales, especially with streaming exclusives like VIEWS and The Life of Pablo.
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Amid the hoopla over this release strategy, another defining feature of Blonde has been somewhat underplayed: the fact it’s now a complete Apple exclusive, and therefore unavailable on services such as Spotify.
