Rihanna’s Anti finally arrived last week after three years of rumours, whispers and 2,000 word thinkpieces that, when boiled for 4-6 minutes, eventually reduced down to the words, “It’s still not here, and I have no further information to add”. Then it dropped last week from nowhere, and what an album it was; one that showed Rihanna doesn’t need to be anyone but Rihanna, bringing with it pop masterpieces like “Consideration” and “Kiss It Better”.
But like a beautiful baby born into a broken home, it arrived in a state of crisis, flip flopping all over the internet like a squid on a bouncy castle. First, it was mistakenly uploaded to Tidal, then it was taken down from Tidal, then it was re-uploaded to Tidal, to counter any illegal rips taken from the original mistakenly uploaded Tidal. Good old Tidal! You gotta love ’em.
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Today, it’s transpired that Jay Z’s tragicomic streaming service might be responsible for a pretty huge effect on the sales of Anti, with the album only racking up 460 copies in the US so far. Obviously, that figure is not representative of popularity or profits just yet. Plus, thanks to Rihanna’s $25million Samsung deal, one million of their users got it for free, and it was also vastly abundant to stream for everyone else. So, technically, the album has already gone platinum, but not whoa platinum in the Adele way; more meh platinum in the Jay Z way.
Still, despite this frantic orgy of corporate deals, free downloads and streams, barely anyone actually bought the album via Tidal in the first 24 hours it was available, meaning the US chart body Billboard (who don’t recognise albums given away by phone companies as sales) were obliged to place Anti at number 27 in the charts, with only four million streams and 460 sales in the US.
Maybe this heralds a bold new non-traditional era for the music industry, where album sales become less than one percent of the income required from an album campaign – although the living and breathing concept of Adele seems to suggest that era is still a long way off. But surely a blockbuster pop album from Rihanna should still sell more copies than Kreayshawn straight off the bat, right? I mean, that’s less than Robin Thicke’s Paula. That… that means its sold less than all of these things…
HG MOULD SPRAY
Say what you like about mould spray, but when you need it you really need it. And when you really need it, there is no better mould spray to purchase than HG’s Mould Spray, available from Amazon dot com, where it is classified as the #1 bestseller in mould removers. It pains me to say it – because I really dig “Consideration” – but with over 1,784 five star reviews, it’s almost certainly more in demand than copies of Rihanna’s Anti at the moment.
DVD COPIES OF BEN AFFLECK AND JENNIFER LOPEZ’S, GIGLI
Ever wanted to see Ben Affleck play a low ranking mobster who is a lot more sensitive than he likes to let on, and wanders into mobster cafes, smashing laptops and shouting “SUCK MY DICK DOT COM!”? Ever wanted to see Jennifer Lopez crudely spread her legs and say, “It’s turkey time! Gobble, gobble!” Wanna see both of these things in a movie with a 6% ranking on Rotten Tomatoes? Maybe you should purchase the DVD of 2003 film, Gigli.
CUPS OF COFFEE SOLD IN THE CAFE OUTSIDE OF OUR OFFICE EACH DAY
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We went to ask the people who work at the coffee shop outside our office exactly how many cups of coffee they sell each day, and let’s just say their tiny, kinda cute little shack contributes to a high-percentage of messy bowel movements in the East London area. Maybe go and visit them, they’ve sold more coffees than Rihanna’s, Anti.
POULTRY WORLD MAGAZINE
With over 10,500+ readers’ right from poultry farmers, poultry breeders, poultry consultant, feed millers, veterinarians, and nutritionists to management level or above, Poultry World has out sold the new Rihanna album ten times over. If this were the 1990s, then Poultry Word Magazine are Oasis.
ALL THE MAGAZINE’S THAT RAN RIHANNA COVERS
And they say print journalism is dead!
THE SHORT-LIVED ‘VANILLA ICE CREAM’ FLAVOUR MONSTER MUNCH
People say the worst flavour of Monster Munch is Roast Beef or the Spaghetti Sauce flavour (launched and forgotten in the 1990s; sayonara little potato prince), but these people obviously haven’t tried the “Vanilla Ice Cream” edition. Released in 2004, the product was received with a widely negative reaction – presumably because no sentient human with a working set of taste-buds wants to eat crisps that taste like milk.
THIS JOB LOT OF 1,000 EMERGENCY SEWING KITS
This job lot of 1,000 emergency sewing kits hasn’t actually been sold yet, but when it inevitably does and we move one step closer to solving the world’s slowly unstitching thread epidemic, eBay user ‘transformtraining’ will have out sold the Rihanna album. Keep fighting the good fight, buddy.
THE BIOGRAPHY OF THIS PERSON FROM GEORDIE SHORE
A biography by someone who is barely twenty five years of age and only famous for being on the UK reality TV show Geordie Shore, you say. But wait, don’t be hasty: the book covers both her eventful teenage years and really cuts to the truth about Gaz Beadle and his parsnip shaped peni– actually, you know what, I’m gonna stop the joke here. How has this sold more copies than Rihanna’s Anti so far? Tidal, what have you done?
