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DJ Khaled reportedly planning to sue Billboard for being ‘cheated out of a #1 album in the country’

Posted on June 10th, 2019
by
Staff Editor


DJ Khaled is planning to sue Billboards over their chart results, claiming that he was cheated out of the No. 1 spot because the organization unjustly discounted bundle sales, as reported by Page Six reports. So it looks like his beef isn’t with Tyler The Creator after all!

Billboard allegedly agreed it would include downloads from Khaled’s energy drink bundle, which totaled over 100,000; but then they retracted the agreement, disqualifying all of the sales from the promotion, contending that there were “anomalies” in his numbers. As a result, Khaled’s lawyers sent a letter to Silvio Pietroluongo, SVP of charts and data development at Billboard.

A source close to DJ Khaled told the Page Six, “When Khaled’s team tried to appeal, Billboard refused to budge.” Khaled’s team saw the situation to be more unfair after the figures from Tyler, the Creator’s bundle deal counted in his sales total. On May 30, Billboard revealed Tyler’s album IGOR debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 165,000 albums sold, while Father of Asahd was placed at No. 2 with 137,000 sold.

Roc Nation is also not happy with Billboard for disqualifying Khaled’s bundle sales, as reported by the New York Times.

Desiree Perez, chief operating officer at Roc Nation, stated that the idea and practice of bundles is “confusing and demeaning to art.” She continued, “We’re obviously not fans of bundling, nor should anyone who cares about artists making music. But our hands are being forced by Billboard’s desperate, last-ditch effort to keep streaming from eliminating what’s left of music downloads.”

Based on the reported from Times, Tyler and Khaled’s albums had almost the same number of streams, but what broke the tie was the validity of their bundles.

According to Complex, Billboard examined both artists’ packages for discrepancies. Both offered with merchandise, but Khaled’s album was also offered with sales of energy drinks. That was the component that the chart-monitoring company thought wasn’t accurate, largely due to obvious attempts at encouraging bulk purchases. It was also reported that a blog post by e-commerce site Shop.com told its members to buy 12 packages to “push DJ Khaled and Market America to No. 1!”

Deanna Brown, the president of the Billboard-Hollywood Reporter Media Group, made a statement to defend the choice: “In this particular instance,” she said, “we saw an organization encouraging purchases among their members by promising them material and organizational benefits.”

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