Taylor Swift, who holds the No.1 album for the second time with “Folklore”, may be one of the last stars to take advantage of Billboard’s so-called bundle rule, which allows artists to sell albums with merchandise or concert tickets . Long criticized for distorting the charts, that directive will be cut in October.
But Swift is also the latest to take advantage of a lesser-known chart rule, one that is a bit of a brain-twister: bundling a physical album with a digital one.
Billboard has long tried to anticipate the delays that could occur when ordering a physical copy of an album, such as a vinyl LP, from an artist’s website. With release cycles moving faster these days than ever, records and CDs are sometimes not ready to ship when a new title starts streaming; in the case of vinyl, backlogs of weeks or even months are common. Thus, artists often combine the sale of a physical album and a digital version, and send fans the digital one while they wait.
Until recently, Billboard and Nielsen Music, which provided the magazine’s data, counted the first version sent to fans. For an album like ‘Folklore’, with CDs and LPs not immediately available, that means the digital copy.
But this rule, which was intended to record pre-purchases during a very important opening week of an album – and also prevent double counting – has a host of complications, including physical product undercutting. Last year, Nielsen had just 73.5 million physical album sales in the United States. How much higher is the real number, if many delayed vinyl and CDs were categorized instead?
Effectively last Friday, Billboard changed how it accounts for physical albums bundled with digital versions. Those sales points will now be counted as physical copies – but only if the album has been sent to a fan. That could be a hit for this week’s opening numbers for an artist like Swift, as collectibles later make their way to fans. And it will further benefit streaming activity.
In the second week out for “Folklore”, Swift has offered its fans many more merchandise offers. But of the 135,000 sales points that Billboard and Nielsen recorded for the album – 84 percent down from the opening – the majority were attributed to streaming. Songs from the album were streamed 134 million times, while 30,000 copies were sold as a complete package.
This week there are also two posthumous albums – Pop Smoke’s “Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon” and Juice WRLD’s “Legends Never Die” – Nos. 2 and 3. The cast album “Hamilton” Broadway is no. 4, and Lil Baby’s “My Turn” is no. 5.
Beyoncé’s album “The Lion King: The Gift”, a companion to Disney’s 2019 film, hit the charts again at no. 10, after releasing a deluxe version of the LP with the release of “Black Is King,” their new visual album on Disney +.
