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You Don’t Listen to Music with a Calculator. But Metrics Matter More than Ever
One thing I’ve never thought was, “Hmm, this album sold a lot of records. Maybe I should check it out.” Historically, it’s been rare to see the bestselling records among the most well reviewed. The top-selling acts of the ’90s were Mariah Carey, Céline Dion, and Garth Brooks, all popular artists who weren’t the critical darlings of their time. Michael Jackson’s Thriller is probably the biggest outlier; you could also look to the Beatles’ discography for a direct correlation between high quality of art and large quantity sold.
But after a few hours of wading through today’s increasingly toxic online discourse, you might come away with the idea that sales numbers are by far the most important marker of quality for music fans. The discourse around new album releases has devolved into a morass of faceless avatars spouting industry jargon at each other online, civilians cosplaying as major label executives and A&Rs when they actually have no professional stake in the chart performance of whatever pop single they’re evangelizing for.
Social media accounts and personalities, like Chart Data, Talk of the Charts, Pop Base, Pop Crave, Kurrco, and DJ Akademiks, are mostly content aggregators, resharing what artists post on social media as their own content. But one major and consistent part of the content strategy for these accounts is the way that they repurpose sales data: intentionally enflaming and emboldening various fandoms across the stanosphere into commenting, liking, and sharing their posts.
These pages market themselves as sources for daily music news and updates, but what this form of online discourse actually does is cultivate a hostile social media environment where first-week sales have been turned into something that the audience cares about and posts about, where the winners are those who sell the most records and the losers are only mentioned to highlight their futility.
In September 2024, Tommy Richman, coming off the success of two hit singles, released his debut album. He opted to take a risk by leaving his singles off, attempting to let his artistry speak for itself. It backfired mightily, all but muffling the buzz that he had previously garnered. And the blogs were first in line to publicly humiliate him for it. Kurrco posted “Tommy Richman’s debut album ‘COYOTE’ reportedly sold ~3.4K units first week” seemingly with the expectation that the internet would pile on and clown the “Million Dollar Baby” singer. At the time of writing, that post had 1.1 million impressions on X.
I’d predict that many of the people who saw Kurrco’s post were unaware that Tommy Richman had even released his album. I know I was. This post likely succeeded in tainting the public’s perception of the release before they’d even heard it, while subsequently influencing how it will be listened to in the future.
Not all albums are hits right away. Now considered an all-time classic of East Coast hip-hop, Nas’s Illmatic sold a paltry 59,000 units in its first week in 1994. Its longevity was secured by universal critical praise and underground street buzz. Most of my favourite albums didn’t resonate with me on first listen; it was only after some time and repeated exposure that things clicked into place.
Lorde’s Melodrama, a dense, writerly art pop album, didn’t connect with me upon its initial 2017 release but has since burrowed its way past my defences almost a decade later. Would I have even bothered to put myself through the trouble of listening again if an account I trusted made a post implying how crappy it was right after it came out?
To consider how we arrived at the point where sales are seen as a definitive measure of quality, we have to examine the past. Started in 1958, the Billboard Hot 100 chart evolved from several early incarnations to become the first reliable way to evaluate the success of music singles through retail sales and radio play. Sire Records founder and journalist Seymour Stein, discussing his part in creating the chart in an interview with Billboard.com, said the Hot 100 was originally designed as a tool for music industry insiders to quickly assess purchasing trends and to see which singles were most popular. In his words, the Billboard Hot 100 was “a guide to potential, as well as the current hits.”
Billboard would call all the megastores and the mom-and-pop record shops in America directly to ask for ranked lists of what they thought were the bestselling releases that week. As you can imagine, this process was vulnerable to corruption and manipulation. According to former Billboard editor-in-chief Timothy White in an interview with the New York Times, some record store employees were “bribed with clock radios and all sorts of amenities and favours” if they juiced the numbers.
On May 25, 1991, Billboard started to factor in Nielsen SoundScan (now known as Luminate), which provided point-of-sale retail data scanned at the register through barcodes, into its albums chart and eventually all its charts, including the Hot 100 singles chart.
The new system wasn’t exactly foolproof. Rumours of labels buying thousands of their own CDs and dumping them in a warehouse to guarantee a number-one debut persisted. Tommy Boy Records founder Tom Silverman accused record labels of buying their own digital singles on iTunes to help them rise up the charts in a 2010 interview with Wired.
Malfeasance aside, SoundScan’s arrival still revolutionized and professionalized the sales reporting process, generating accurate numbers for the charts for the first time in Billboard’s history and subsequently bringing a new significance to first-week sales.
Just a year before SoundScan’s debut, the industry was crowning the likes of Milli Vanilli, MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice, and New Kids on the Block. The introduction of SoundScan levelled the playing field, immediately leading to a more sonically diverse set of artists topping the charts. It better reflected the changing mores of the American music listenership in the early ’90s, capturing favourites such as Nirvana, N.W.A., Metallica, Garth Brooks, and Ice Cube. It was a sea change. Labels used this new data to aid in their marketing efforts, and fans’ interest in watching the charts turned them into an unintentional audience to what was an industry resource in a music trade publication.
The formula for the chart was significantly altered when digital downloads were included in the tabulations in 2005. Two years later, Billboard incorporated streaming data for the first time. (As of January 2026, YouTube streams no longer factor into the Billboard charts.) When it compiles its weekly charts today, Billboard includes downloads and streams with physical sales data by using two metrics: Track Equivalent Albums (ten song downloads from an album count as one album sale) and Streaming Equivalent Albums (1,250 paid song streams or 3,750 free tier song streams are equal to one album sale).
All of those changes set the stage for what would become the watershed moment for fan awareness of first-week sales: the 50 Cent–Kanye West (now known as Ye) chart battle of September 11, 2007.
There had been one-on-one competitions for the top spot on the charts in the past. Blur and Oasis famously tried to settle the Battle of Britpop by pitting their new singles against each other back in August 1995. (“Country House” by Blur came out on top.) But a sales faceoff had never been so central to the marketing of two albums as it was between Ye’s Graduation and 50 Cent’s Curtis.
The rappers were featured on the cover of Rolling Stone in a confrontational pose that mimicked a boxing promo. Similar to Oasis versus Blur and their class dichotomy, the perceived ideological differences between the artists added stakes to the friendly competition: 50 represented the status quo of New York gangsta rap in the wake of his world-conquering Get Rich or Die Tryin’ while Ye had been incrementally ushering in a more artful vision for conscious hip-hop following the paradigm shift of The College Dropout.
The two poles of the culture went head-to-head, the corporate face from the birthplace of the genre versus the flashy outsider from Chicago, a city with a comparatively less defined hip-hop history at the time. The industry couldn’t have dreamt up something better. When Ye won with a commanding 957,000 to 50 Cent’s 691,000 first-week sales, it was as if the culture had chosen a direction for itself. Violence, drug dealing, and guns were suddenly out of style. A new wave of alternative rap pointed the way forward, all led by the left-field fashionista who hired Takashi Murakami to design his album cover.
The fans who helped Ye to victory by buying his album were now cemented as part of rap history, forever tied to a music moment with reverberations that can still be felt today. Fan participation became more pronounced in the chart battles that followed Ye and 50 Cent’s legendary tilt. Spotify became the most popular streaming service in the 2010s—and along with it came a focus on public play counts, allowing fans to see how their favourite new singles are faring on a daily basis.
Today’s fans follow the chart placements of their favourite musicians like a trader watches the stock market. Sales numbers are cited in stan wars by fans as a definitive metric for the supremacy of their faves.
After SZA posted about Mercury retrograde and unexpectedly set off a torrent of abuse from Nicki Minaj in what could be considered a proxy war in the Drake–Kendrick Lamar conflict, their fans fought alongside them. When SZA predictably got terrorized by the Barbs, her fans clapped back with detailed comparison charts of each artist’s total ticket revenue from recent tours and streaming data. Stans rarely make subjective claims as to why their favourite artist is the greatest; they come armed with verified objective data (which can be wilfully misrepresented or cherry-picked in whichever way benefits their argument).
Minaj suggested that SZA was manipulating her streaming numbers with “botted enhancements.” A similar accusation was lobbed by AkademiksTV when the page pointed out that Kendrick Lamar had over a billion fewer monthly Spotify streams in August 2025 when compared to February of the same year. (He had played the Super Bowl halftime show that month, explaining the temporary boost in streams.) During the bombshell leak of Young Thug’s alleged prison phone calls, Thug allegedly admitted to paying $50,000 for fake streams to help his artist Gunna’s album, DS4EVER, debut at number one on the Billboard 200 over the Weeknd’s Dawn FM because he “got the plug on that.”
A 2020 NPR report shined a light on a chart manipulation tactic employed in South Korea known as sajaegi. The term describes the practice of illegally bulk-buying essential items and has become shorthand for when a K-pop act hires a company to falsely boost their sales for chart placement through the use of hacking or “stream farms”—rooms full of countless phones logged into different user accounts, each playing the same track to boost a song’s streaming numbers. It’s becoming more difficult to discern how many superfans are real people and not bots or record label PR engaging in an astroturfing campaign.
K-pop fans have used sajaegi-like tactics in their quest to help their favourite acts get to the top, such as streaming a song repeatedly. This fan behaviour has crossed over to North America and has even been promoted by artists themselves; Justin Bieber shared fan-made graphics that instructed his legion of listeners to create a playlist with his 2020 single “Yummy” and let it play overnight while they sleep.
Fans have gone to increasingly desperate ends to climb the charts, sometimes directly competing against other acts and their fandoms in the process. Taylor Swift released six new variants of The Tortured Poets Department that were geo-locked to the United Kingdom and only available for twenty-four hours on the week’s final day of sales tracking when it looked as if Charli xcx would top that country’s charts with Brat; Swift blocked Charli from the top spot. Swift similarly made three new vinyl variants of The Life of a Showgirl available for a single day in a move that appeared to be an attempt at preventing Tate McRae’s deluxe version of So Close to What from ousting Swift from her seven-week-long perch at number one. Sabrina Carpenter’s fans mobilized to block Travis Scott’s rerelease of Days Before Rodeo from debuting at number one so Short and Sweet would be crowned the bestselling release for that week.
When Pusha T and Malice reunited as Clipse to put out 2025’s Let God Sort Em Out, their first album together in over fifteen years, the duo returned to a vastly changed music ecosystem. They came up during the time when you could just hop on MTV, maybe stop by BET’s Rap City: The Basement, do a couple magazine interviews, and be done with it. They approached this new rollout with vigour: hitting the podcast circuit, doing brand collabs with Carhartt and Adidas, and connecting with all the legacy media outlets for interviews.
When the album finally dropped on July 11, 2025, to wide audience approval, the usual suspects were lining up online to decide whether or not it was a sales flop. One page posted that Clipse were “on pace to sell 90K” in the first week, pegging them at the fourth spot on the Billboard 200 charts, which a commenter said “def exceeded my projections.” Clipse re-emerged into a world where regular people now made sales projections for albums.
Various accounts with divergent agendas argued about whether Clipse landing fourth after such an extensive rollout was a horrendous failure or a major W. One X user pointed out the hypocrisy of the people who roundly mocked Lil Wayne’s poorly received Tha Carter VI for selling 108,000 first-week units now turning around and calling 90,000 a success. Clipse’s 2002 debut album, Lord Willin’, scored 122,000 first-week sales.
When the smoke cleared, Let God Sort Em Out ended up with 118,000 units in its first week, coming within a hair of where they landed for their debut. This led many of the pages to go back on their negative opinions to declare the album a unanimous success.
And all along, the music on the record remained the same.
Excerpted from Ways of Listening: Building a Deeper Relationship with Music in the Streaming Era by Rollie Pemberton. Copyright © 2026 by Rollie Pemberton. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
The post You Don’t Listen to Music with a Calculator. But Metrics Matter More than Ever first appeared on The Walrus.
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