Has Kanye West bagged himself a #1 album?
This may well be the case. But how did he do it? There is no physical copy of the album for fans to purchase, only a digital download available through Kanye’s own site, and up until last week the album was only available to stream via Tidal.
Well, Kanye West is pro at placing himself at the front-and-centre of controversial situations at any chance that he gets, which often makes people quickly dismiss his music strategic decisions for his need of headline dominance. But, Kanye definitely had bigger plans than bagging the latest headline. The exclusive strategy saw The Life Of Pablo streaming numbers soar. Tidal reported that the album was streamed over 250 million times in the first 10 days.
Prior to the album being released on Tidal, Kanye proclaimed that the album would ‘never never never’ be available on Apple Music or any other streaming service. This caused a craze in Tidal sign-ups with many claiming that he may have single-handedly doubled Tidal subscriber numbers. Though, after making this bold statement he then later ‘changed his mind’ and made the album available on both Apple Music and Spotify. But, this was not before his album had racked up hundreds of millions of streams solely from Tidal.
Beyond making bold statements that rally up a frenzy among his fans to listen to the album whilst doubling subscriber numbers for Jay Z’s Tidal, Kanye also gave his fans a reason to continue to stream the album over and over again.
Just as his fans had thought they’d had enough of listening to the album, Kanye announced that he was making significant alterations to numerous songs on the album, which he did – nearly every song on the album has had an update. The modifications include additions of reverb, alterations in background vocals, basslines and several other changes. So those fans that have already streamed the The Life of Pablo, continued to stream the album.
Since Billboard includes streaming figures and individual track downloads into their formula for Billboard 200 top albums chart it a large factor in determining chart success.
As a result of these changes, Kanye’s genius strategies for increasing streaming numbers may have bagged him the first #1 album fuelled by streaming and practically zero sales.
(Image by Kenny Sun, Creative Commons, Attribution 2.0 Generic, cc by 2.0)
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