Yassin Mokbel

QUALITY OVER QUANTITY. For years, artists have used different tactics to ensure they reach the top of the charts. However, this has only seen the decline in the quality of the listening experience. “The way to fix this [problem] is for the artists themselves to focus more on making high-quality music and not being obsessed with the numbers,” Mokbel said.

2024 has been nothing short of an eventful year for pop music. From Ariana Grande to Beyoncé to Billie Eilish, it feels like there hasn’t been a week where one of the industry’s biggest stars hasn’t released a new album. While many of these artists have been dropping some of their best work, a lot of the conversations surrounding them haven’t been about the music. Instead, sales numbers and chart rankings have plagued many of the year’s biggest releases.

The idea of selling more than everyone else is not new. In the 2010s, the preferred method was bundling free versions of albums with merch, inflating the sales numbers of the actual music. Eventually, in July 2020, Billboard introduced a rule to stop counting bundle sales when calculating the total sale numbers of albums. However, in 2024, a new method for increasing sales has become the go-to for artists. This method comes in the form of exclusive digital albums, available only through purchase on an artist’s website.

The most prominent case study for this digital album phenomenon is Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department. The megastar’s 11th album remained at the top of the charts for 15 weeks of the summer, between May 4 – and Aug. 24 (only taking a two-week break between July 27 and Aug. 3). Just in the first eight weeks of the album’s debut, until June 23, Swift had released 34 different digital versions of the album, including unreleased tracks and acapella versions of songs. At the same time, both Billie Eilish and Charli XCX, huge artists in their own right, released their new albums. Yet with Swift’s calculated and well-timed digital release drops, both artists were blocked from reaching the #1 spot on the charts. The situation was particularly rough for Charli, as Swift dropped 6 “UK versions” of her album to stop her from hitting the top of the UK charts.

Swift is not the only artist who is guilty of this practice. More recently, Travis Scott’s 10th-anniversary version of his Days Before Rodeo mixtape and Sabrina Carpenter’s sixth album Short n’Sweet, released on Aug. 23, resulting in an all-out battle for the #1 Billboard 200 spot. Both artists released digital versions of their releases hours before the sales tracking period ended. In the end, Carpenter debuted at the top, with the difference in sales being in the hundreds, resulting in online controversy from the two artists’ fanbases about who was truly on top of the sales race.

The common theme between digital album release tactics is their lack of care for the quality of music. If anything, the situation has only made listening to music all the more confusing. The reality is that only die-hard fans will go out of their way to purchase the albums. It is a tactic that exists for no reason other than to make more money and does nothing to add to the artistic value of the music. With their already storied catalogs of hits, one has to question if Swift, Scott, and Carpenter even needed to be on the top of the charts.

While Billboard could easily remove digital album sales from their calculations, that is not the end of the problem. The issue lies in a larger commodification of music that is deeply embedded in the industry and is causing a decline in quality. The way to fix this is for the artists themselves to focus more on making high-quality music and not being obsessed with the numbers.

The truth is that people don’t remember what albums charted higher or sold more copies; they remember what it felt like to listen to their favorite album for the first time.