Slavin Vlasic
/
Getty Images
The torrid, Tidal-exclusive release of Kanye West's The Life Of Pablo will not release its first week streaming numbers to be counted for the Billboard charts, according to The New York Times.
Billboard’s vice president of charts and data development Silvio Pietroluongo told the paper:
“Billboard has been informed that Tidal is not currently reporting streams for tracks on Kanye’s album to Nielsen Music. Therefore streams from Tidal for this title will not contribute to Billboard’s chart rankings at this time.”
It's not entirely surprising, considering Tidal is the only place you can legally stream to The Life Of Pablo, with downloads unavailable for the foreseeable future, even to the people who have already paid for the record. Releasing these figures from such a limited release would invariably lead to an unimpressive showing on the chart for the rapper, whose last album Yeezus debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. It would also have made The Life Of Pablo the second major release affiliated with Tidal to debut with underwhelming numbers, after Rihanna's Anti debuted on the charts at number 27.
It's a great album though, regardless of archaic metrics. You know what else deserves to go platinum, though? This picture of Kanye's son Saint West.
