Kanye West's new album isn't in the charts because Tidal won't release streaming data
As The New York Times reports, streaming platform Tidal isn't giving out any data about how much it has been streamed - so Billboard can't include it.
"Billboard has been informed that Tidal is not currently reporting streams for tracks on Kanye's album to Nielsen Music," Billboad's VP of charts and data development Silvio Pietroluongo said. "Therefore streams from Tidal for this title will not contribute to Billboard's chart rankings at this time."
"The Life of Pablo" (TLOP), released earlier in February, is Kanye West's seventh studio album.
The launch has been at times disorientating. Kanye - AKA Yeezy - jumped between multiple names for the album before finally settling on TLOP, and posted frequently updated track listings on Twitter as he worked.
On February 12, he debuted the album at a show at Madison Square Garden alongside his latest fashion line - but continued to change the track listing until its public launch two days later.
It did not go smoothly: Initially available to buy on his website, users encountered issues trying to buy it, and the download option has now been removed altogether. Yeezy now says the album will "never be for sale," forcing users to install Tidal, the Jay Z-owned streaming platform he has a stake in, to listen.
Throughout this all, Kanye has been tweeting a surreal stream-of-consciousness from this Twitter account - alternately picking fights with ex-girlfriends and asking Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for a billion dollars.
But even without Tidal's streaming data, we know TLOP is pretty popular. More than half a million people have pirated it.