Travis Scott's team has taken issue with the recent placement of their client's mixtape, Days Before Rodeo, behind a Short 'n Sweet Sabrina Carpenter on the Billboard 200, calling Billboard and Luminate’s sales measurement “unreliable and incomplete.” The team claims that nearly 1,300 units sold before the deadline were not counted in first-week sales.
The letter, sent by an unnamed Cactus Jack Records representative to Luminate, the data company that manages the charts, claims that Scott would have had enough units to beat Carpenter's 362,000 sales and reach Number One (Travis was apparently counted just over 361,000).
“This is not about Travis vs. Sabrina, but about the integrity of the process and the questionable tactics used in the U.S. charts,” a representative for Travis Scott told Rolling Stone. «It could happen to any artist».
In the lengthy letter, the Cactus Jack representative accused the Billboard process of “arbitrarily discarding sales verified by reputable vendors,” using “archaic processes for counting independent retailers’ retail sales,” and making decisions “inconsistent with historical precedent.” The document also names a Luminate employee for previously working at Carpenter’s Island Records label.
“With such a close ranking – only a thousand units apart – we implore the reporting organization to fairly and transparently take a final look at this set of facts, and reconsider its position on the count of 1,291 verified units,” the letter reads.
A spokesperson for Billboard at PMC, the parent company of Rolling Stonehe declared to Rolling Stone That Billboard «supports the data and methodology of our rankings».
The letter also details an alleged conversation with Tommy Stalknecht, CEO of Single, which operates Shopify, about an “extremely high volume of orders” following the release of a deluxe version at 11:20 p.m., before sales closed at midnight.
In some screenshots, examined but not verified by Rolling StoneStalknecht claims that nearly 1,300 units were sold in the last 15 minutes before midnight, the number needed to get Scott to the number one spot. The letter also claims that Luminate did not accept the sales in time. A company representative's comment, via text message, said the sales were not worth the “headache” of fighting to get them on the charts. Stalknecht declined to comment, saying Rolling Stone: «We do not comment on our clients' business.»
Over the weekend, when the sales numbers were tallied, Scott's team reportedly reached out to Luminate numerous times to have these missing units added, but the company apparently “did not respond or acknowledge receipt of the data.” The letter claims to have faced “the exact same issue” when Scott posted Utopia in 2023, which prompted Luminate to recount its sales numbers. “Luminate did not respond to us all weekend,” the letter reads.
A representative for Luminate did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Rolling Stone to comment on the letter, even if the confirmation came on Vulturewhich first reported the news. “We are confident that our numbers are accurate in accordance with our processes and methodology,” Luminate said.
The letter also questions Luminate’s “counting and weighting of independent retailers,” which the team says gave Carpenter an advantage over Scott without having transparent data. “This certainly pushed Sabrina’s final unit sales to just above Travis, almost exactly the same amount of units we mistakenly ‘missed’ that should have been counted in the first week,” the letter reads.
Finally, the letter names a Luminate employee whose LinkedIn profile shows he worked at Sabrina's label, Island Records, for the past three years, casting doubt on the employee's “objectivity.”
“This is particularly concerning given the timing given that his signing to Island came in early 2021 while he was still employed by the company (until May 2021),” the letter reads, adding that – logically – the employee would have “a personal incentive to encourage the artist to sign with his previous employer.”
Representatives for Sabrina Carpenter had no immediate comment.
Translation from Rolling Stone US.
