This revelation means that no other act with a scheduled of possible December release will challenge Adele for the rest of the year—not Coldplay, whose 12/4 release is projecting to just under 200k at presstime, roughly 450k south of Adele’s projection for the week. Not Rihanna —if this were a conventional physical/digital rollout, handicappers think it would debut with 150k. But has her team at Roc Nation figured out a way to make the Samsung giveaway count toward her sales total? Will these releases be subject to the “Tidal curse”?
So this is a hypothetical prediction of what the album would sell if it was released with a different method? And it's supposed to be accurate, even though we don't even know the release date or the exact method of release yet
Rihanna has never really had huge first week numbers, though. 150,000 wouldn't be bad for her, especially with the way the market has declined since 2012.