Sabrina Carpenter - Short n' Sweet (August 23, 2024) Album • Page 14

I usually only do streaming so I don't mind paying the $5 once, but it sucks because I agree pre streaming there was a lot of gatekeeping but now we're all reliant on how insane stans are haha

 

I don’t think I’ve bought a digital album in like a decade lol

 

It ain’t serious until Travis Scott announces the $5 vinyl like he did for utopia

that was an insane deal to see happen

 

Yeah I think we've lost the plot. I'd be psyched if I was an artist and my album went #1 because that is legit cool af. But if I had to do all this scheming to get it, would it feel the same? Im sure they bank on people not caring enough to make a fuss and at the end of the day they can add it to their list of #1s so who cares, but it definitely doesn't feel the same as an "organic" #1, if such a thing even exists. I feel like Sabrina, chappell, and Charli won the summer regardless of rankings on the charts and that's what'll be remembered.

 

I know this isn't Taylor's thread, but Pepperidge Farm remembers...

 

depends what you consider organic haha, look people with resources always succeed there's a reason why Sabrina and Chappell are on the same label

 

I, for one, did NOT remember this. But wow, clearly she went back on all of that.

 

I truly think once you reach a certain echelon of wealth, where money will never, ever be a worry several lifetimes over, you just lose your mind with what your purpose is or goals are, besides just gaining more power or putting more numbers on the board.

 

she released one last one with a taste demo lol

 

I can't help but feel like...wasn't this supposed to be the "song of the summer" artist? It's just weird to feel like even our biggest acts have to fight absolute tooth and nail to top the charts/net decent numbers. Weird moment for the music industry.

 

Isn’t it the opposite though? Her numbers are incredible, isn’t this supposed to do over 300k? There’s just two artists right now who are having a huge week. It’s just that we all decided #2 isn’t a good spot anymore

 

I dunno man, the fact that a re-released 10-year-old mixtape poses this much of a threat is surprising and weird to me. I thought her numbers would be a lot higher than 300k, given how those singles have been talked about.

 

respectfully, we get it that you hate espresso lol. we don’t have to do this. it’s selling great and that’s great?

 

It’ll be the fourth highest debut of the year, behind Taylor, Beyoncé, and Billie, and that was going to be the case even before the bonus tracks. People have been gaming the charts at least since I started paying attention to them. They’ve never been perfect and they never will be, but for me music (at least pop music) feels more exciting than it has in several years.

 

i think this is an interesting point that people somewhat implicitly understand but we still react to unfairly. I’ve seen enough rags (or middle class)-to-riches artists, athletes, etc lose their minds over money to think it would happen to a vast majority of people. The more you have, the more reward you’ve gotten for your work, the more you have to lose. It’s just how the mind (and capitalism) works. It’s a bad look, some people become more beholden to it than others, and we should still hold people accountable when things go bad, but I think it’s less the character flaw we make it out to be (not necessarily referring to Taylor) and more just…human behavior.

 

I guess I just really expected bigger numbers for this, given how well the singles have done and how much buzz there was. It felt to me like a pretty perfect build-up to an album release, and I would have predicted both an easy march to no. 1 and something more in the 400k-500k range. Then again, her numbers are in line with what the Olivia Rodrigo albums did, which also makes a certain amount of sense. And maybe I'm underestimating just how much the length of this album works against it in a numbers game against stuff like those Taylor and Beyonce record.

 

Ban charts, blow it all up

 

The length is working against it but I also don’t think they did a phenomenal job driving Sabrina preorders. From what I can see, she doesn’t seem to have a fan base that will auto buy on digital either, so I’m sure the ratio of streams to sales on the singles aren’t bumping the chart placement like some of the other artists you mentioned. Doing those kind of numbers primarily through streaming is hard… Olivia also had a perfect rollout for SOUR and that hit like 295k.

The Travis Scott project is the same length so that ain’t it. Beyond the 6 digital variants he’s selling, we’re also just not taking into account that Travis Scott is one of the absolute biggest streaming artists period. They’re on the exact same level from a monthly listeners perspective.

 

Do you mean pushing the vinyl/CD side of things? Midweek, it was looking like about half that 300k number would come from straight album sales, which seems solid enough, though obviously not Taylor numbers. It does feel comparable to SOUR in a lot of ways, which was also an album I was surprised didn't do a bigger first-week number. But IIRC, SOUR was also kneecapped by the fact that they didn't have vinyl ready to go on release day, and then got a big bump a few months later when the physical editions came out.

You're right though, I am absolutely underestimating Travis Scott in this equation. I forget how big he is.

 

Honestly the vinyl preorders are so much lower than I thought they’d be. This is backseat quarterbacking but I kind of feel like they didn’t do a good enough job connecting the singles to an “era” for fans to get behind.

 

It did feel like "Espresso" was a one-off single for awhile. I wonder if that hurt the preorders, like you're saying. I do respect that she didn't play the vinyl variant game, though.

 

I honestly don’t think the album was planned. She was a global brands priority in March but the album wasn’t even listed with a placeholder Q3 release date on our upcoming releases by the May update.

 

Interesting. So, potentially rushed out because of the success of "Espresso"? If so, I'm impressed by how good it is.

 

/shrug

Based on some convos I was having in Feb, I think they knew the single was going to be huge… so album was prob on the table. Either way, they couldn’t have known it would be song of the summer. Island is usually good about updating the lists. Either way, album’s great!

 

Chorus challenge to not turn a thread about a popular artist into a multi-page discussion about charts: impossible