“The 45-minute long music video is available, only as a full-length stream, exclusively through the Apple Music streaming service”, they wrote this morning, “and because of that uniqueness, it is not now eligible to chart”. The move made waves in the industry, leading to rumors about Universal Music Group (the parent company of Def Jam) banning streaming exclusives entirely and a potential lawsuit against Ocean for the release.
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One of the sub-dramas bubbling beneath the last two weeks of Frank Ocean-dominated news has been over the artist’s method of release for his two (!) albums.
In other Blonde-related news, it’s mad interesting that he dropped the album as an independent release, with no major label backing. Generally, an artist isn’t allowed to release new music with another label until an acceptable amount of time has passed. Frank Ocean’s new album Blonde nabs the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200 albums chart after a huge first week.
This data was provided by Music Business World. Lady Gaga’s former manager Troy Carter, who joined Spotify as a high-profile artist liaison this summer, reiterated that point this week, telling Billboard that “exclusives are bad for artists, bad for consumers and bad for the whole industry”. He then posted a weird live video that saw him chopping wood for hours on end, teasing the fact new music was coming.
Blonde, released on Ocean’s own Boys Don’t Cry label, is looking like a dead cert to top the Billboard 200 chart tomorrow (August 25).
It’s now exclusive to Apple Music, but that hasn’t stopped it racking up 32,000 in combined sales with 26k of that from downloads.
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“Blonde” is nearly 200,000 sales in front of the number two album “Brave Enough” by Lindsay Stirling but has sold less than half of Beyonce’s first week sales for “Lemonade”. Given the short turnaround between the two albums, it’s questionable whether UMG had any knowledge of Frank’s decision to release Blond, and therefore may have grounds to sue. However, it also doesn’t cover illegal streams of Ocean’s album.
