Fri 29 Jan 2016
It may have been a messy rollout (the album was prematurely uploaded to TIDAL by accident on Wednesday afternoon — two days ahead of its initially planned release), but luckily for Hov’s troubled streaming platform, Rihanna’s ANTI is already a huge success. According to the RIAA, RihRih’s eighth LP, which was officially released exclusively through TIDAL yesterday, has gone platinum.
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Congratulations to @Rihanna! #ANTI is officially #RIAAPlatinum. @RocNation @TIDALHiFi pic.twitter.com/Dg6c6vDLmz
— RIAA (@RIAA) January 29, 2016
Of course, this isn’t exactly surprising considering Samsung had pre-purchased one million copies of the album, which Rihanna offered to her fans the day of the release — similar to Jay Z’s MCHG strategy back in 2013. ANTI‘s total number of downloads exceeded 1.4 million in just 15 hours — earning it platinum status by the RIAA — and the album was streamed more than 13 million times the night it dropped, which is still impressive.
Billboard and Nielsen, however, are not counting ANTI‘s TIDAL-driven downloads towards their totals. Still, we doubt TIDAL are concerned; according to Variety, the streaming service welcomed more than one million trial subscribers in half a day thanks to Rihanna’s album. How many of those will decide to stick around, though?
[SPIN]
Related: New Music: Rihanna Feat. Drake “Work”