August 23rd, 2024: Sabrina Carpenter drops her highly anticipated album Short n’ Sweet. At the same time, Travis Scott drops his 10 year old mixtape Days Before Rodeo on DSPs for the first time.
While the album had accumulated hundreds of millions of streams on SoundCloud since its initial release on August 18, 2014, fans were getting ready for Days Before Rodeo to be available on physical copies. Sabrina Carpenter had been doing an album rollout since early July / late June, and Travis did his rollout about a week before the 10 year anniversary release.
We know Sabrina claimed the #1 position on the chart. But there’s solid evidence that it wasn’t the correct outcome.
On September 2nd, after an announced delay for the chart reveal, it was revealed in a leaked screenshot by a Cactus Jack label employee that Days Before Rodeo had placed #1, beating Sabrina’s album by exactly 11,381 copies at the time with 365,817 total copies.
The Billboard chart was delayed by around three days as they had to do a “final filter” on the results. About an hour before the final chart was released, Billboard claimed they hadn’t made a final decision on the updated results and there were less than 2,000 sales dividing the two.
As both releases were great in their own ways, Billboard had declared that the two albums sold around the same amount of copies, ultimately Sabrina beating Travis by 600 copies, with 362,000 total copies, placing #1 on the Billboard charts.
According to a letter sent to Billboard, 1,291 sales of Days Before Rodeo made between 11:45pm and 11:59pm before the deadline were “delayed” by Luminate (the company that handles the data for the Billboard charts) and was also revealed that the Luminate employee who handled the sales data for the two albums used to work for Sabrina’s label, Island Records.
On week two, Days Before Rodeo placed 30th on the chart while Short n’ Sweet was still at #1. This was because Sabrina’s album was still getting radio plays with multiple top songs and everyone had heard Travis’ album hundreds of times prior to the rerelease.
Week three followed the pattern. Days Before Rodeo placed 106 on the chart, 70 spots higher than Travis’ album UTOPIA which released a year prior. Sabrina was clearly winning as she was still #1 three weeks later.
However, on week four, Days Before Rodeo overthrew Short n’ Sweet by taking the #1 spot. Travis had 149,000 vinyl sales shipped and counted to finally gain that spot.
In the end, it didn’t matter if Sabrina hardly beat him on the first week. It didn’t truly matter if some sales weren’t counted. She still outsold him for three entire weeks, as during week two she sold about 100,000 more copies than him, and around the same during week three.
Travis ultimately got his deserved spot of #1, so his team shouldn’t be complaining.