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Hi Princess!
It goes on to show that these certifications are mostly irrelevant. The album gets 4m of its units from downloads, which are excluded from album certifications everywhere except in the US. Streams got included much later on in most countries, they are capped by arbitrary rules more often than not, and video views are also excluded very often. And then, certifications aren't automatic. Put all this together, and you can move millions of units with no cert at all outside of the US.
It's always 100% for lead artists, and 50% divided into all featuring acts (so if only 1 is there, he gets 50%, but if there are 4 features, he gets 12.5%). Obviously the total is more than 1, but we aren't accounting for market figures, we don't add these together, instead we believe that's the best way to retribute the success of each accurately!
Hi Sebastian!
You conveniently ignore both downloads and YouTube views where she does wonders. She has got tons of million sellers, add for 93m even applying downgrades for features, and she got billions and billions of views on YouTube. These were the main formats of consumption for rappers in the first half of the 2010s.
If she was as unsuccessful as you suggest, you wouldn't need to cherry pick your data to make your point.
YouTube isn’t the primary and the only way of how to measure the popularity of a product.
anaconda has 1.1B views on YouTube yet only 770K EAS.. the huge discrepancy between its performance on YT and platforms such as Spotify is very telling. Also, is it even eligible for 6x platinum in the US?
which brings me back to my initial point, she’s just not as successful as how she’s portrayed. all of her stats seem very medicore.
Multiple things to point out;
- Her "healthy" total units seem to be a product of being large rather than of actually being as successful
- I do not believe she's fully comparable to other female rappers except Doja Cat. While the rest were making trap/rap, she was peaking with pop-instrumental, Kesha rejects, produced by Dr Luke (Nicki still works with the rapist to this day). It is proven that she was mostly liked by her pop music when you check the commercial decline that her rap albums caused
- Pink Friday 2's performance is rather underwhelming, opposite to her fans' saying. It has only done 115,000 pure sales globally in its first week despite months and months of preorders and uncountable editions and variants. And it is already down to 10 million daily streams on Spotify, lower than the sophomore studio effort by Tate McRae.
"Truly the most global female rapper."
Well, technically, it's Doja Cat. Since Nicki's pop efforts are counted as a rapper, so should Doja Cat's.
What do you mean by "we aren't accounting for market figures"? I think the 75%/25% used by Billboard makes more sense, 100%/50% makes some songs more valuable than others and basically gives an unfair advantage to hip hop artists imo.
Pink Friday or at least Roman Reloaded has yet to cross the 5M album units in US with the heavy American based album sales and digital single sales, no way she did 5M outside of America. There is definitely something wrong the numbers and algorithm.
Great article!
Must be very hard to do with so many songs, love your motivation.
I thought she will be much lower honestly.
Her consistency is really great in prespective.
Her youtube totals are terrific and shows how much of a Visual artist and popular among young fans she is , as youtube is cheaper.
There is always wrong with sales when the artist we don't like post decent results. Nicki is huge celebrity worldwide. And an actual mainstream female rapper. Streaming numbers of her music are among top 5 women ( top 10 I know). They make perfect sense
Hi SexyRedd fan!
You suggest that 115k pure in first week sales is bad. Do you have many examples of rap albums doing better? There's no way these can be seen as bad numbers. You also point out that Tate McRae is already higher as if that was something she should be ashamed of. Tate McRae has the biggest non-xmas hit worldwide for quite some time, she is doing incredibly on her own. PF2 daily numbers are great in an environment filled with Christmas material/playlists. It has more tracks top 200 that Tate's effort by the way, not even mentioning the fact that Spotify is less favorable to a rap album.
These are very bad arguments to make it look dreadful. Nicki Minaj is over 40, the album is already over 1m and seems a safe bet at 2m+ when all is said and done, possibly more. Turn it around as much as you want, these numbers reflect a successful artist.
Hi Analord!
A body like Luminate make reports about total market data, adding figures from all artists/records on their database, so they will need the total to be 100% of the market. We don't do that, we try to reflect the success of each artist the best we can, we don't need to stick to total songs being 100%.
Then when we list the most successful songs, we take only 1 total, the one from the lead singer. We aren't inflating totals by adding 100% + 50%. Most of these songs aren't part of several studio albums either so there will be no double counting either. As for artists totals, as I said I think that 100/50 reflects the impact of artists better, the 75/25 is flawed. Taking off a fourth of the total to the lead singer is wild, this is his/her project, and nobody can say a track would have done worst without a feature, and I won't even pick extreme examples like One Dance. This method deflates artists who are effectively bigger than their guest performers. The 1 total also ignores the fact that consumers may have consume a song for both artists. Say tomorrow a Drake/Travis collab comes out. Every listener who would have been interested by a new song from both these artists become less than one (0.75/0.25) listener for the artist.
We do have the same 'problem' with albums/songs' CSPCs when albums contain multiple very strong hits. They do not appear that high among top songs' lists, because when a consumer loved Billie Jean and bought Thriller, he won't buy the album again if he would have been convinced by Beat It too, and then Thriller. That's why songs which are the only big hit from their album are with an advantage, but it's difficult to counter that. Here the situation is the same, if a track has 3 superstars on it, and consumers would have streams tracks from all 3, I don't want to push numbers down for each just because the consumer won't be playing the track on repeat 3 times more.
Hi Don!
We can't just through out totals without caring about the method. US units ignore ringtones, totals here include them, they are worth 540k units for PF from the US alone. Then our model values downloads as 0.15 rather than 0.1, PF has 1.7m or 2.6m units from them in the US depending on the method. It doesn't mean our totals are bigger than if we would use a US type method though, as we value YouTube views lower. Our method gives PF 485k global sales from YT views, the RIAA method would give it 2.18m. Applying their model, the debut album would be at 9.80m units.
Then pure album sales are way more US-based than streams. PF2 debuted with 60.8m streams in the US, 58m elsewhere, so roughly a 50-50 split. It's wilder on YT, Super Freaky Girl debuted with 13.7m global views with 'only' 4.7m coming from the US.
