Rihanna’s new album Anti is living up to its defiant name. Today, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified Rihanna’s new album as platinum, but Billboard is not recognizing it as such on the charts. Billboard’s Director of Charts Silvio Pietroluongo spoke with Digital Trends to explain how one organization can call an album platinum, while another does not.
Back in October, Rhianna inked a lucrative $25 million partnership deal with Samsung. As part of her partnership, Rihanna offered a promo code for fans to download Anti for free from Jay Z’s Tidal streaming service. As a result, the album was downloaded 1.4 million times in 14 hours, according to Grace Kim, Tidal’s director of Marketing (speaking with Spin). But, as Pietroluongo explains, Billboard has a “well documented policy of not counting free albums towards the charts.”
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Pietroluongo says the discrepancy between the two organizations isn’t hard to understand once you look into the details. “Billboard and the RIAA don’t always coincide with how they count things,” Pietroluongo says. “[RIAA’s] platinum albums have always operated under their own sort of rules,” citing RIAA’s odd system of counting the sale of one double album as two album sales as an example.
Pietroluongo confirms Billboard and Tidal discussed different ways promotion for the album could work under Billboard’s current policy. In relation to Anti‘s chart position, Kim stated Rihanna and Tidal “would’ve loved to have it count” on the charts, “but ultimately it became about giving music directly to the fans.”
If giving music to the fans was the priority then why did it take so long to release?
Clearly states there's a distinction between RIAA rules and billboard rules and unfortunately for you, billboard doesn't certify albums, the RIAA does.
