Kenny Chesney Outsold Drake By Pulling Off One Of The Most Shameless Chart Manipulations In Billboard History

Surely, nobody saw that coming.

On Thursday (May 14), country superstar Kenny Chesney announced the postponement of his Chillaxification Tour until 2021 due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The summer stadium jaunt was supposed to kick off last month in Arlington, Texas, but Chesney scrapped the first batch of shows with the intention to pick back up on May 30 in Pittsburgh. Now, with the spread of COVID-19 still unabated, the No Shoes Nation will have to wait another year to congregate in groups exceeding 50,000, bound by beer, sweat and a love of country-fried kickback anthems.

Chesney is just one of dozens of stadium and arena headliners who have put their massive tours on hold this year. Normally, the Chillaxification Tour postponement would barely register on most non-country fans’ radars. But the news has drawn the ire of many music consumers, because last week, Chesney scored his ninth No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 with Here and Now, aided largely by a concert ticket/album bundle for a tour that had not yet been postponed and more than 80 merchandise/album bundles. Chesney’s new album narrowly outsold Drake’s Dark Lane Demo Tapes, giving the Toronto rapper his first non-No. 1 debut since 2009’s So Far Gone.

Spectators—particularly Drake fans—have accused Chesney of gaming the Billboard chart methodology to earn his latest No. 1 album. While Chesney is entitled to use the current rules to his advantage as much as any artist, the numbers for his and Drake’s new albums are revealing. Here and Now opened with 233,000 album-equivalent units, of which 222,000 were traditional album sales, while only 10,000 came from streaming-equivalent albums, totaling a measly 13.4 million on-demand streams. Dark Lane Demo Tapes bowed with 223,000 equivalent units, including 201,000 streaming-equivalent albums, or 269.1 million on-demand streams. Drake’s new commercial mixtape came with no ticket or merchandise bundles, and the rapper sold no physical albums; fans could only listen to consume Dark Lane Demo Tapes via streaming or digital download. 

To argue whether Drake deserved the No. 1 album last week is a moot point; he didn’t get it, and that’s not going to change. But while plenty of artists have utilized ticket bundles to earn No. 1 albums when they otherwise wouldn’t have cracked the Top 20, Chesney’s latest strategy is one of the most shameless chart manipulations in Billboard history.

With all due respect to one of country music’s bestselling artists, most fans aren’t champing at the bit to hear Chesney’s new album cuts. They want to sing along to his treasure trove of hits while whacking beach balls around a baseball stadium. By bundling Here and Now with tickets to a tour that was obviously going to be postponed, Chesney cashed in on his fans’ desire for a return to normalcy and sold them a lie that everything would be okay by summertime. I have no reason to doubt Chesney and his team held out until the last possible second and did everything in their power to avoid postponing the Chillaxification Tour, but I am skeptical of how much new COVID-19 information they could have received in the last week to influence their decision. In reality, the only likely difference between this week and last week was a refresh of the Billboard 200.

That doesn’t make Chesney a bad guy or an insidious businessman; it makes him a popular music artist who’s got a standard of success to maintain. Drake doesn’t deserve to go down as a martyr in this chart battle, either; the guy who paid influencers to make “Toosie Slide” a viral TikTok sensation before it even came out and bombarded Spotify with so many Scorpion ads that users demanded refunds is not exempt from the chart-gaming conversation. Rather than slam Chesney for “robbing” Drake of his No. 1 album, fans should question the value of a No. 1 album and what makes artists bend over backward to earn them in the first place. It’s no secret that streaming is the primary mode of music consumption these days. When a country artist with paltry streaming numbers outsells the biggest commercial rapper in the world, it’s clear that a No. 1 album on Billboard 200 doesn’t prove who is the most popular artist in the United States on any given week; it merely proves who is better at topping the Billboard 200 by any means necessary.

The system is obviously flawed on both sides. The streaming-equivalent album formula will never be perfectly accurate, and there’s no way of knowing how many customers who buy ticket bundles actually listen to their accompanying albums. It’s plausible that more people listened to Drake’s Dark Lane Demo Tapes than Chesney’s Here and Now last week, even if the charts don’t reflect that. Regardless, history has proven that Drake will have the last laugh. Chesney debuted his last album, 2018’s Song for the Saints, at No. 2 below Drake’s Scorpion, which was then in its fifth consecutive week at No. 1. Song for the Saints dropped to No. 13 in its second week, while Scorpion finally dropped to No. 2 behind Travis Scott’s Astroworld. With the excitement of the now-postponed Chillaxification Tour in the rearview, Chesney’s latest album is destined for a similar freefall on the Billboard 200, while Drake’s sad-rap smorgasbord will hug the upper realm of the chart for weeks to come.

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