She may have some flop singles but in contrast with the smashes you can't really call her a flop.

This!

She never truly flops.

By the end of 2009:
According to mediatraffic One of the Boys was around 2,8 million WW.

By the end of 2009 In the US alone the album was around 1 million.

Now the US sales of One of the boys are around 1,6 million, which means the album has sold 600k since the end of 2009 in the US alone and yet you say the album hasn't reached 3 million WW in 4 years?

She's a good catalog seller unlike others.

She's the queen of pop.



These are amazing.

lmao

But then Un and Drunk happened

Katy? She only promoted Birthday once and paid TIHWD dust. How is that pushing her "flop" singles?

well Ok the 3M comment was a bit off, but you got my point. It's not even 4M let alone 5 And then again if you say it has sold more than 4M, that just means that TD is WAY less than 6M because Billboard confirmed her sales WW to be 10M albums sold. Make your calculations yourself. (the receipts were given after Roar was released)

Rihanna hardly flops. When one of her singles flops, it's a urban or a promo single and she and her record label do not give a single f**k about it

Nobody cares about the flops because there's always a hit single waiting to happen
Even if we discount featured singles, from 2006-2013 (before her break)
she has gotten about 1.4 #1s a year
and considering her lack of promo those are crazy statistics

Because of their image: people can imagine Katy or Gaga being angry for flopping while Rihanna probably doesn't care that much. Same for Britney.

I feel like her time will come with R8.

This doesn't make sense because artists like Gaga and Katy have more hits than flops yet they get dragged. If anything they shouldn't get dragged as much.

OOTB ended up at 2.8M on Mediatraffic in 2009.
Since then (and until 2012), it had sold 700k in only three countries (US/UK/Germany).

So it is between 3.5M (at the very least) and 4M but yeah ok.

Her standards are low.

Because a Rihanna song flopping doesn't mean Rihanna the Artist's status is lessened or that she isn't relevant anymore, it just means that particular song did not connect. I mean, Rated R and Talk That Talk had pretty similar first week sales despite the lead single for the latter being 100x bigger than the lead single for the former.

Greasy nailed it, again. Love this.

Basically everything that's been said in this thread. Her "underperforming" songs were never aimed to be big hits, many of them are highly experimental, or performed in specific genre (and succeeding in its charts); had pretty little/no promo and still performed rather good in certain regions (take "Te Amo", which was released for Europe only, or "Rehab", or California King Bed"); had music video in support only, which still got its VEVO certificate. In the meantime, she has recent hit singles fresh in people's minds. Remember that "flop" means big effort put in the promotion etc - if Rihanna performed with "You Da One" or "What Now" as much as she did with lead singles (or even with the likes of "What's My Name?") and they would still perform as they did, maybe... although, due to the level of, hmm, Rihanna's "attention" to them, their chart positions are very high. This applies practically to her every song released as single.

Considering album sales, she's always on point, her sales per album slip gradually and eventual numbers are high. Besides, even if in the beginning of sales data, her Billboard 200 numbers comparing to other national charts are about 1:2, in a month they're around 1:3 and end up in 1:4 to 1:7, etc.