Frank Ocean’s ‘Endless’ Isn’t Qualified To Chart On Billboard 200

Christina Lee | August 28, 2016 11:59 am
Kanye: Play Frank Ocean
See Kanye West's tweets requesting that radio stations play Frank Ocean's new music.

Only one of Frank Ocean‘s two new albums will impact the Billboard 200 next week. Visual album Endless will not chart because Billboard doesn’t have the proper data, says Billboard itself. “While Endless is an innovative release, there is — so far — no industry-accepted album-equivalent ratio for streaming an entire visual album,” the industry bible says.

As of now, Endless is only available in one format: a 45-minute video that isn’t for sale on Apple Music. Frank had to have made its featured tracks available to purchase, as Beyonce did with Lemonade two days after its HBO premiere, in order for Billboard and Nielsen Music to chart its impact on either the Billboard 200 or even the Music Video Sales chart.

Currently, Billboard and Nielsen Music also counts 1,500 streams of songs from an album to equate one unit sale. As of now, neither organization has a similar equation figured out for albums like Endless. (“But, for example, does one stream of a 45-minute album equate to one album unit?”)

Meanwhile, despite having been pirated almost a million times, Blond is on track to debut at #1 next week.

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